Meeting Report: Microbiomes of the Built Environment #3 – Day 2

Report on Day 2 of the “Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application”.  My report and Storify of tweets from Day 1 can be found here. Session #1 “Beyond Bacteria: Viral and Fungal Ecology in Indoor Environments” First speaker was Linsey Marr “Viruses in the Built Environment”.  Talking about their work looking at …

Meeting Report: Microbiomes of the Built Environment – Meeting #3: Day 1

Today was the first day of the 3rd meeting in the NAS-sponsored series of “Microbiomes of the Built Environment:  From Research to Application” meetings.  This meeting was held at UC Irvine and the goal was to provide information for the NAS committee that will subsequently produce a report on the status of the field.  For …

EPA Webinar Series: Preparing for FY17 Tribal Housing Funding Opportunities

(Webinar series of possible interest, text below from e-mail) U.S. EPA Indoor Environments Division and the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals present Tribal Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Healthy Homes Webinar Series, Fall 2016 Preparing for FY17 Tribal Housing Funding Opportunities Learn about innovative green and sustainable building design and projects from tribal building experts. Learn …

Healthy Buildings 2017, Europe. Call for Abstracts due October 31st

Received this by e-mail, of potential interest to many at microBEnet: Healthy Buildings 2017- Europe July 2-5, 2017, Lublin, Poland   Call for Abstracts Deadline: October 31, 2016 Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to invite you to Healthy Buildings 2017 – Europe — one of ISIAQ’s flagship conferences, which in 2017 will be held in Lublin, …

Swabs to Genomes Class: Results Paper Published

So last Spring quarter Ashley Vater and myself ran a class where we went from abalone feces swabs on the first day, to a draft of a Genome Announcement on the last day… written by the students.  With 16 students in the class we ended up with 10 sequenced/assembled/annotated genomes.  A full description and summary …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16: Day 4 and Random Thoughts

Only three talks on the last day.  First up was Jordan Parker “Microbiome Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) Benefit Students and Faculty”.  Great talk about how we need to move from cookbook labs to discovery-based research, talked about the “I Microbiologist” textbook.  The challenge is to scale research to class-sized groups.  She described the competency-based …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG16: Day 3

First up today was Rachel Dutton talking about “Horizontal gene transfer in Cheese”.  She began by talking about cheese as a great model system for understanding the principles behind microbial community formation.  Many replicates, controlled conditions, manipulable etc.  After doing initial 16S/ITS survey they cultured representatives of all the dominant genera in the cheeses and …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day 2

Esther Singer opened the day talking about “Metagenomics to Reveal Correlations between Switchgrass Ecotypes and their Microbial Communities”.  She told a nice story about the ecotype-specificity of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere microbial communities.  I was surprised that for some bacteria this was evident even at the phylum level… so big differences. Daria Van Tyne “Changes …