Really nice article from Sarah Zhang at Gizmodo “Not Even Science Could Explain the Bacteria In My Apartment“. In it, she discusses the results of her participation in the Wildlife of Our Home study, the NY metagenomic data, and the fact that we’re still in the “exploration” phase of DNA-based microbial ecology. I think it’s …
A couple of weeks ago in San Jose was the inaugural meeting of the Citizen Science Association, “Citizen Science 2015“. I previously posted my thoughts on day one here at microBEnet. On day 2, Holly Menninger, Jenna Lang, and I organized a session entitled “Citizen Microbiology: Engaging the public in the study of invisible life”. …
Finally got around to reading “Impacts of Flood Damage on Airborne Bacteria and Fungi in Homes after the 2013 Colorado Front Range Flood” from the labs of Shelly Miller and Noah Fierer. The massive floods in 2013 provided the researchers with an opportunity to examine the lingering effects of flood damage, even post remediation. Ideally …
I’m currently attending the inaugural conference of the Citizen Science Association… “Citizen Science 2015“. Over 650 participants from around the world have arrived in San Jose to talk about all the various flavors and implications of citizen science. It’s been a fascinating conference so far, not least because there’s very little agreement on what the …
Great article about a great study. Read them both. Failing that, here’s my short version: A study entitled “Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics” came out yesterday that is just fascinating on multiple levels. This article describes a large-scale metagenomics study carried out by the PathoMap project at Weill Cornell Medical …
When we take a swab and perform 16S sequencing we assume that this gives us a picture of who is present in a bacterial community. But actually what we’re measuring is what DNA is present on that surface. This technique doesn’t tell us who is alive, who is dead, who is viable, who is non-viable, …
NOTE (3-12-15): THESE RESULTS ARE INCORRECT. We have left them here for comparison. A blog post describing the problem is here and the correct information can be found here. We’ve finished analyzing all the data from the “Microbial Playoffs” part of Project MERCCURI (described here). Each microbe that was chosen to fly to the International …
From the perspective of biothreat detection, one of the biggest questions is “what is the background?”. If you sample the air near a farm, there’s a good bet that you’ll find anthrax (or at least a close relative indistinguishable by a 16S PCR survey). But that’s just because anthrax lives in the soil, not because …
Just a quick reminder that the Abstract Deadline for Healthy Buildings America is January 15th. This conference will take place July 19-22 in Boulder CO… just following the Sloan Microbiology of The Built Environment Conference, also in Boulder from July 15-18. Here’s a description of the Healthy Buildings Conference: Healthy Buildings is a unique forum …
Just a quick post here to highlight an article I was reading over the break, “Inactivation of Norovirus on Dry Copper Alloy Surfaces”. We’ve posted a number of times in the past about the use of copper in the built environment as an antimicrobial (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). It’s a somewhat charged …