Abundant Human DNA Contamination Identified in Non-Primate Genome Databases

[Seqsmachine]

This paper http://www.plosone.org/article/info:...l.pone.0016410
is tearing through the media right now.
NCBI has already issued a statement http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/About/news/18feb2011.html regarding the analysis but what are your folks thoughts on the implication of current and future databases?
I personally don't think these findings are detrimental to all the knowledge we have acquired but im interested in our future structuring of cloud based data that we'll need to harness for the swell tide of nextgen data.

I didn't find a thread started by anyone through a simple search so I hope I'm not reposting.

[westerman]

I suspect that the answer from most of the long time bioinformatics people will be a shrug and a "so what?". As NCBI points out, contamination of the data has always been with us. Always verify your results. If I could get back the days I have spent tracking down errant results based on bad data ... well, I could go on a nice looooong vacation. :-(

[james hadfield]

Has anyone looked for PhiX in the data on the SRA? I would not be surprised to find lanes with lots of it.