Fascinating look at the design of a science infographic (on life in dust)

Designers Martin Krzywinski and Barbara Jeannie Hunnicutt provide a peek behind the scenes, and explain how they developed a data visualization based on bacterial genome information derived from dust. Source: The Evolution of a Scientific American Infographic: Secret Life in Household Dust – Scientific American Blog Network This is an absolutely fascinating look behind the …

Simple & elegant solution to a big problem in DNA based microbial diversity studies

A new preprint has come out in PeerJ that presents a simple yet elegant solution to one of the bigger problems in DNA based microbial diversity studies.  The authors (Wenke Smets, Jonathan W Leff, Mark A Bradford, Rebecca L McCulley, Sarah Lebeer, Noah Fierer) show how one can use the addition of an internal standard …

A very important paper for any interested in microbial ecology: importance of rare taxa

Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …

“Mapping the Great Indoors”, New York Times article about the microbiology of the built environment

A great article in the NYT today about the microbiology of the built environment ranging from pillowcases to hospitals to asthma.   Includes interviews with Noah Fierer, Rob Dunn, Paula Olsiewski, Jessica Green, Jordan Peccia, and Jack Gilbert. A good link for sending to family and friends that ask “what are you working on again?”