So a number of years ago our lab embarked on Project MERCCURI (let’s not talk about the tortured acronym). This complex and citizen science-based collaboration (website here) has been a fascinating journey. It’s ranged from getting to watch a rocket launch in Florida, to discovering/describing a new bacterial species, to our most recent publication… the …
Just heard about this course from a former undergraduate in our lab who spoke very highly of the opportunity. “GEOBIOLOGY 2018 An International Training Course in a Rapidly Evolving Field”. Takes place during summer 2018 at Caltech. Information from the website below. Now entering its 15th year, the International Geobiology Course is an intense, multidisciplinary …
Just a quick post here to say that Dr. Jenna Lang, formally of the Eisen lab at UC Davis, will be on Science Friday tomorrow, 12/8/17 talking about our work examining the microbiome of the International Space Station. She expects to be on at around 12:40pm PST. The publication is here, and we’ve compiled …
The third and final day started with a Keynote talk by Marc Edwards about “MoBE, Public Health and the Flint Water Crisis”. It’s really hard to sum up this talk, I would recommend watching the video if interested. Marc talked about the Flint crisis from their perspective, starting with their pre-existing work on corrosion and …
Here’s the Storify from Day 3 of the Microbiology of the Built Environment meeting in Washington D.C. A more detailed summary to follow later. [View the story “#MOBE17 Day 3 Summary via Storify” on Storify]
The first evening of the #MoBE17 meeting was a reception, with a fabulous keynote talk by Ed Yong mainly focused on Science Communication. Ed had a number of tips for interacting with journalists and thinking about how we present stories instead of facts. The quote of the evening was surely “you cannot replace a feeling …
Just a quick post here, an interesting BE story from NPR called “The Taming Of The Brew: How Sour Beer Is Driving A Microbial Gold Rush“. I don’t even like beer but I thought this was a fascinating story.
We were super excited to see the recent paper “Recovery of nearly 8,000 metagenome-assembled genomes substantially expands the tree of life“. Really, the title says it all… the authors took hundreds of published metagenomic studies (focusing on non-human environments) and assembled thousands of genomes. Awesome. But we were curious how many of these genomes came …
So one of my projects for the last few months has been to try to create a collection of every peer-reviewed publication that resulted from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program of the Microbiology of the Built Environment. The program has been running for over 10 years and has funded over 100 grants. To generate …
So this is the culmination of a huge amount of work by a large number of folks. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) just released a new report “Microbiomes of the Built Environment: A Research Agenda for Indoor Microbiology, Human Health, and Buildings”. This report was requested by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National …