Registration is now open for the 2020 Gordon Research Conference on Microbiology of the Built Environment, to be held June 7 – 12, 2020 at Proctor Academy, Andover, NH (USA). Conference schedule and registration information is available on the conference website (https://www.grc.org/microbiology-of-the-built-environment-conference/2020/) with updates through the conference twitter handle (@MoBEGRC). We also have funds to …
So this last week, we ran a workshop on bacterial genomics at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Who is “we”? An amazing collaboration across several institutions. The whole thing was initiated by Dr. Parag Vaishampayan (NASA-JPL), who contacted myself (UC Davis), Dr. Elinne Becket (Cal State San Marcos), and Dr. Kenisha Johnson (Alabama A&M) about …
Skin-associated bacteria are abundant indoors. A comparison across studies shows that up to 30% of bacterial sequences detected indoors are associated with the human body (see Table 1 in this 2016 paper). I’ve been kind of skeptical that these sequences represented live organisms, however. Rather, I suspected the high proportion of sequences that were human-associated …