I got this email a few days ago from Jed Fuhrman. He had sent it to a group of people working on mcirobial diversity and he encouraged people to share it. I asked and he approved posting it here and I thought it would be of interest. (The image above is from Lane et al. 1985 …
This is one of those stories / articles / posts that simultaneously fascinates me and freaks me out a bit and for which I fluctuate wildly between those two points of view: bioME – RSA Human By Nature Entry on Behance By Candice de Aguiar Her basic design idea here is to allow for more microbial diversity …
There is an interesting and potentially important new paper out from Caitlin Proctor, Marc Edwards and Amy Pruden: Microbial composition of purified waters and implications for regrowth control in municipal water systems in Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology. The abstract is below:
A new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology reports the effect of plants on microbes in the environment. It’s about a plant in a box, so if you like cheesy 80’s music, you could play the song Living in a Box from the band with the same title. Here is the study: Microbiome interplay: plants alter microbial …
Mental health and its possible relation to the microbiome is a controversial topic in today’s news. Here’s new research suggesting that schizophrenia may be linked to the oropharyngeal microbiome, as the study found “high-level differences” in bacteria of people diagnosed with the disorder and of those without. If true, this could add insight into the …
What’s that cool structure in that UC Davis research field? It’s an egg mobile! Egg mobiles are exactly what they sound like — a mobile chicken coop that can be towed to a different location, such as a different area of a pasture. There are nestboxes and roosts inside for the egg-laying chickens; they also have …
A presentation at the 2015 International Conference on Emerging and Infectious Diseases held August 24 – 26 in Atlanta, Georgia is getting a bit of attention and may be of interest (though I could not find any data yet behind it). Basically a group from UNSW looked at transmission of RSCV in a NICU and as part …
An article at Space.Com discusses a new push to make sure that spacecraft do not inadvertently contaminate the places they are visiting (e.g., Mars). What microbes are on space vehicles and how to make sure the parts that are sent to other planets are “clean” or “sterile” is an interesting and active area of research. …
In response to studies showing that antibiotic resistance can spread through the food supply, the FDA has made some recent policy decisions about the use of antibiotics in livestock rearing. A public meeting will be held by the FDA on September 30, 2015, from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Jefferson Auditorium, 14th and Independence …
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 …