STD telephone

Do you remember playing telephone as a child? The participants sit in a circle and the leader of the group whispers a message in to the ear of the individual on his left. The message is passed around the circle in this fashion, likely corrupted on its journey, until it is spoken aloud by the the individual on the leader's immediate right. What fun!

Now most adults would probably not be entertained by such a juvenile pastime. With the advent of rapid microorganism genome sequencing, however, we can replace the secret message by the genome of particularly obnoxious bacterium or virus. The leader, who is infected by a pathogen of known chromosomal sequence, whispers the message to the next individual on the list, and so forth until, after several rounds of whispering, the organism is cultured from the purulent discharge of whichever orifice and its genome is sequenced and compared to the original. What fun!