Over the last several years our lab has spent a fair bit of effort on collecting and sequencing genomes of bacteria from the built environment. Genome sequences are useful for a number of reasons including facilitating metagenomics and understanding the actual metabolic capacity of particular microbes. In particular we hope that genome sequences will facilitate …
Cool-sounding program fellow position at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation working on symbiosis. Text from the job posting below: Program Fellow, Science The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s science program supports exceptional scientists, invests in new technologies, and brings together new scientific partnerships. We believe in the inherent value of science and the sense …
(This blog post was written by group #1 as a writing assignment. See their first post here. Note that much of what the students did in this class is taken directly from the Swabs to Genomes paper which contains relevant links and references) This week in class, our goal was to create a phylogenetic tree …
(this post was written by group #4 as a writing assignment) With a minor setback from last week’s inability to efficiently wash and quantify the amplified DNA, we came back this week with a stronger mindset to pick ourselves back up and turn our failures into a positive. At the start of this week’s class, …
(posted on behalf of Paula Olsiewski and the Sloan Foundation) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces a funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program. The Foundation seeks to further the development of talented early stage Ph.D. scientists and engineers through the Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Postdoctoral Fellowship program. …
Received an e-mail today from Cameron Turner (@enviroDNA) with information about an upcoming workshop “Understanding the Ecology of Environmental DNA from Diverse Disciplines” to be held at the annual ESA meeting, this year in Fort Lauderdale, FL, August 7-12th. Some information from the e-mail below, also attached is the workshop flier. The workshop is titled …
(this post was written by group #3 as a writing assignment) After last week, our extracted DNA samples were amplified with PCR and the finished product brought this week to lab for us to purify and prepare for Sanger sequencing. The first step we took this week was to analyze the success of PCR using …
(this post was written by group #2 as a writing assignment) The goal of this week experiment was to extract genomic DNA from our samples for sequencing. Ultimately, we want to characterize the DNA from samples by sequencing them. However, since our isolates are in small amounts, we need to do an additional step (in …
Our latest Project MERCCURI paper came out last week and so I figured I’d do a quick post about it here since it’s a good fit for the microbiology of the built environment. In short, we collected a number of bacterial strains from built environments on earth and sent them to the space station to …
For the last few years our lab has been really excited about the idea of having undergraduates culture bacterial isolates and sequence their genomes. Starting with the Undergraduate Built Environment Genomes Project in 2011, we went on to re-write and upgrade the assembly pipeline that we use, followed by the publication of the “Swabs to …