Nucleic Acid Observatory

The Nucleic Acid Observatory (NAO) is a biosurveillance program that looks for new pandemics by sequencing all of the genetic material in samples such as sewage, airplane toilet waste and nasal swabs, without deciding in advance which pathogens to look for. It was founded in 2021 as a project of the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Kevin Esvelt, later moved to the nonprofit SecureBio, and on March 9, 2026, was renamed SecureBio Detection.^[1][2] Its announcement said that the work was not changing: "we'll continue defending against pathogens designed to evade detection".

The project is discussed at length in "Our North Star", the 2022 statement of purpose of Molecular Reality Corporation.

The idea was set out on August 5, 2021, in a paper signed by the Nucleic Acid Observatory Consortium, "A Global Nucleic Acid Observatory for Biodefense and Planetary Health". It begins with the lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic: "SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated that the speed of our response is critical, as each day of delay permitted exponential growth and dispersion of the virus." Most testing looks for one pathogen at a time, with a test designed for its known sequence. The observatory would instead sequence everything in a sample and watch for any sequence whose abundance grows exponentially across successive weekly samples, the signature of a spreading infection. In the paper's words, the NAO "could detect any virus or invasive organism undergoing exponential growth whose nucleic acids end up in the water."^[3]

The design was aimed at threats that nobody knows to test for, including pathogens engineered to avoid existing tests. Esvelt laid out the larger strategy, of which detection is the middle step, in a 2022 policy paper.^[4]

The observatory's wastewater system is called CASPER. From the autumn of 2023 it worked with the Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and with Ginkgo Biosecurity on waste from airplane lavatories, and with municipal treatment plants on ordinary sewage, including a site downstream of an international airport and partners in Los Angeles. A second program, Zephyr, collects nasal swabs in Boston; more than 16,000 had been collected by March 2026.^[5]

By March 2026 CASPER's data made up most of the metagenomic wastewater sequencing in the public Sequence Read Archive, about 1.3 trillion reads. Its first detection of wild-type measles traced one case in a sewershed of more than a million people, and it had detected measles 21 times; the most recent sample, taken on March 9, was reported seven days later. The group's stated goals were to bring that interval down to five days and to automate the pipeline so that it runs without people.^[5]

"Our North Star" opens its case for universal molecular sensing under the heading "An Enduring Bioshield". It defines the threat as engineered agents, "Not your run of the mill kill a few hundred million people pandemic threats, but advanced engineered threats", and calls the Nucleic Acid Observatory "a damn good start".^[6] It then argues that the observatory's method has a weakness. Sequencing depends on DNA polymerases and other enzymes that copy natural nucleic acids, and organisms with "chemically novel genomes" could pass through it unseen. The document's answer is the company's own field: "Solid-state nanopore sequencing will not have this vulnerability."^[6] A solid-state nanopore reads a molecule by the change it makes in an electric current as it passes through a hole, without copying it.

The company calls the defensive network it imagines the Planetary Bioshield. The two plans differ in their sampling points. The observatory goes to sewersheds and airports; the company's 2022 document lists "air handling systems, toilets, and drains" in ordinary buildings, which makes wastewater surveillance a domestic activity.^[6] A 2025 draft of the company's quiz dungeon includes a skeptic's warning that a planetary network might produce "constant global panic or 'cry wolf' fatigue".^[7]

• Biobot Analytics
• Utility-scale molecular sensing
• Nanopore sequencing