Report and Storify from Lake Arrowhead: Day 2

Another great day at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics meeting.   The session titles today were “Metagenomics/Pathogens/Antibiotics/Evolution” and “Antibiotic Resistance”.  As always, the best summary of the talks can be found in the Storify below.   My random notes are here… these are just the things that struck me. Thanks to Surya Saha for the Storify!

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Antibiotic resistance is ancient and very widespread.

Antibiotic usage in livestock is responsible for a whole mess of resistance-related problems.  Has impacts well beyond the practitioners.

People are better at identifying faces than they are at comparing stacked bar charts and we might use this to develop better visualization tools, particularly as they relate to citizen science and public outreach.

Two of the big challenges in Citizen Microbiology are the fact that people can’t see the bugs and that community data is hard to visualize.

Metagenomics is hard (Yeah I knew this already but it got reinforced a lot today)

Need to adjust metagenomic data for genome size and need to be more careful about removing false positive “novel” sequences.

Annotation of both genomes and metagenomes is a very inaccurate process.

Herbivorous insects can be collection devices for doing plant virus metagenomics, dragonflies can be even better since they eat the other bugs.

Outdoor dynamics are more important than indoor/occupant factors for predicting fungal taxa indoors.

Different levels of biomass between samples can potentially bias results, should at least be measured.