The 2016 Summer Olympic Games attracted 1.17 million tourists in the two weeks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Yet, until the 2016 Summer Olympics, there has never been an infrastructure to monitor the impact of such a large-scale human event on the city’s genetic profile.
As a part of a global consortium to monitor cities, this project pioneered the first-ever, city-scale collection and measure of the Olympics, dubbed the Olympiome. Tracking of localization, transit, and persistence of these visitors’ metagenomes was done. We can then determine where they colonize and change the local urban metagenome of the host city, including the presence and the fluctuations of medically relevant entities such as anti-microbial resistance markers (AMRs) and phages.