Special Seminar at #UCDavis: Dr. Norman Pace on Metagenomics and the Tree of Life

Special Seminar Dr. Norman Pace Distinguished Professor Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology University of Colorado, Boulder Metagenomics and the Tree of Life Tuesday, October 6th, 2015 1.30 pm Genome and Biomedical Science Facility (GBSF) 1005 Host: Jonathan Eisen (jaeisen@ucdavis.edu) For more about Pace’s work see http://pacelab.colorado.edu

Invasion of the Built Environment by a Microbiologist

So – I thought some people here would be interested in this.  As someone who has been involved in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in “Microbiology of the Built Environment” for many years, I have been trying to get more involved with the built environment crowd.  And I have not always been exceptionally successful …

Antimicrobial Films for Implants

Researchers at Inserm/Strasbourg University have developed an antimicrobial film for implants. One of the biggest problems with implants is that they can provide ideal breeding grounds for pathogens, causing inflammation in the surrounding tissue and subsequent rejection of the implant. Often, this is avoided by prescribing patients antibiotics or coating implants in them, which of course have …

Water Sanitation Issues in Developing Nations

Sanitation remains a problem in many developing countries across the globe. However, this issue goes much deeper than just delivering clean water to billions of people and treating sewage waste. The Conversation ran an article earlier this month on this topic. They bring up two important aspects of implementing water treatment programs in struggling countries. One …

The unseen side effects of antibiotics

Some antibiotics routinely used in the clinic are considered to have little side effects. Such is the case for cefprozil, a second generation cephalosporin. This relative safety may be true (to a certain degree) from the viewpoint of humans taking the antibiotic. However, it is not the case from our commensal microbes’ perspective. Our study, …

Microbial Response to Urban Stress

A new paper just came out from Dunn et al  about how urban stress effects microbial communities in Manhattan. Urban structures can provide barriers to species movement and create islands of life, both for macro- and microscopic creatures. Here, they sampled soil bacterial and fungal species, as well as ant communities, from small road medians and large …

Request for comments on scikit-bio: should we drop support for Python 2 in favor of Python 3 only?

scikit-bio is a library implementing core bioinformatics algorithms and data structures, and providing support for bioinformatics data munging. You can learn more about the project by watching Jai Rideout and Evan Bolyen’s 20 minute SciPy 2015 talk. scikit-bio currently supports Python 2 (i.e., Legacy Python) and Python 3. We’re considering dropping support for Python 2, …