Today a colleague sent me a link to a Genome Biology paper entitled “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists.” At first glance, it reminded me of Greg Caporaso’s post about Twitter last month. But as I continued to read, the slight truth behind the premise described in the paper fascinated, …
Many recent news stories have been discussing a case of an outbreak in a hospital in Greenville, SC that has apprently been traced to drinking water contamination. Thus this may be of interest to a variety of people. See some links below: 4th patient with GHS infection dies. Fourth bacterial infection death reported at South …
There is a paper that just was published that possibly will be of interest to those interested in studying microbial ecology of drinking water (or other water systems for that matter): Methodological approaches for studying the microbial ecology of drinking water distribution systems. Unfortunately the paper is not freely or openly available. The paper covers many topics …
Well, been having many discussions recently about PCR amplification happening from “negative” controls where no sample DNA was added. Such amplification is alas pretty common – due to contamination occurring in some other material added to the PCR reaction. Obviously it would be best to eliminate all DNA contamination of all reagents and all PCRs. …
If you’ve been reading our posts, you are quite familiar with our efforts at characterizing the bacterial and fungal communities of the built environment. We’ve described our study design, experimental protocols, and results. One thing we may have left you wondering about, however, is the nuts and bolts behind the analyses we and other MoBe …
Posted a request for help on Twitter but I thought it might be of interest to some other people so am also posting about it here. Basically what we (me and Lizzy Wilbanks in my lab) is to take some microbial genomes and to fully annotate all of the repeat elements and all of the …
There is a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology out that may be of interest: Viruses Throughout Life & Time: Friends, Foes, Change Agents. In a way this could be seen as a formal declaration of viral love by a collection of eminent scientists. Mostly I agree with what is in the report, through …
Got alerted to a very interesting paper because I have subscribed to Google Scholar automated updates for Brent Stephens (see a full list of Google Scholar pages for researchers working on microbiology of the built environment here). The paper is: Tools to improve built environment data collection for indoor microbial ecology investigations by Tiffanie Ramos and Brent Stephens …
For those interested in conducting “microbiome” type studies where DNA sequencing is used to characterize and compare microbial communities this could be uf use: Conducting a Microbiome Study by Julia K. Goodrich, Sara C. Di Rienzi, Angela C. Poole, Omry Koren, William A. Walters, J. Gregory Caporaso, Rob Knight, and Ruth E. Ley. It is a good overview …
Just got this email letter from the American Society for Microbiology and I thought it would be useful and important to share. Please – everyone out there doing work involving potential harmful microbes – redouble your efforts to do that work as safely as possible. And also consider careful the risk – benefit balance for the …