(This post was written by group#1 as a writing assignment) A new class yet to be named begins giving students hands on experience with genomic sequencing. We are attempting to sequence bacteria from diseased abalone. We had fecal samples from both healthy and diseased red abalone and white abalone, 4 in total. In the first …
Much discussed among microbiogists have been various scenes from the book and film (both excellent), “The Martian”. In short, the protagonist mixes some earth soil, some human feces, and some Martian soil to grow potatoes on Mars. Would this work? Is the feces required? Would you get sick? Are the microbes even needed for plant …
Just got this e-mail from Indoor Air 2016… they’ve extended their early bird registration to April 10th for the meeting this year in Ghent Belgium. Details below: Dear Indoor Air 2016 enthusiasts, In this April edition of the newsletter we would like to remind you about some practical issues related to the conference: Early bird …
Got an e-mail reminder today from the organizers of this NAS meeeting… sounds pretty relevant for people studying the microbiology of the built environment! :) Detailed information below: Register Now: Microbiomes of the Built Environment Meeting Monday, April 11, 10:30 a.m. — 5:00 p.m. EDT The National Academy of Sciences Building, 2101 Constitution Avenue …
So I had two thoughts when I read the article title “Indexed PCR Primers Induce Template-Specific Bias in Large-Scale DNA Sequencing Studies“… #1: Ack! Yet another thing to worry about in the insanely complicated craziness that is 16S amplicon sequencing. #2: I probably shouldn’t be the person to blog about this because I’ve honestly never …
Here at microBEnet we are big fans of citizen science… focusing not surprisingly on citizen microbiology projects. We’ve hosted several workshops and conference sessions on the topic as well as running a couple of projects ourselves. Personally I think engaging people through the process of actually doing science is incredibly valuable and I hope the …
(edited 7:15pm 3-7-16, to make it clear this was a patent application not a patent) So I got an e-mail from Jonathan Eisen this morning asking me if I had seen this tweet about a patent application regarding surveying the microbiome of the built environment: @watermicrobe this reads like “materials and methods” sections for most …
Another interesting (and closed access) paper from Indoor Air… this time from Naegele and colleagues in France… “Microbiological consequences of indoor composting“. Indoor composting has become more and more popular in urban areas where traditional composting isn’t an option. Here’s a nice look at what that does to the microbial community of the location. Abstract …
So having gained a reputation as the toilet guy (e.g. Slate, RedOrbit, microBEnet) I felt like I just had to write about this article. Plus it sounds really cool. This article is by Jennifer Fouquier (also cool) who is in Scott Kelly’s lab at UC San Diego San Diego State. The title “Rapid assemblage of …
Isolating interesting bacteria and sequencing their genomes has never been easier and our lab has worked extensively on this topic, particularly in the context of undergraduate education. Our first foray into this field came in 2011 with a group of students working on the “Built Environment Genomes Project” and eventually culminated in our Swabs to …