Today marks the inaugural launch of mSystems, a new open access ASM journal on systems microbiology, founded by Dr. Jack Gilbert of Argonne National Laboratory and a Sloan-funded microbiome of the built environment researcher and collaborator to many readers of this blog. The mSystems Senior editorial board is comprised of a team of microbiome experts: …
After a truly amazing response to the Knight Lab’s Poop MOOC that was offered last fall (19,000 students signed up!), we have decided to offer this course again in On Demand format, which allows more flexibility for those who sign up for the course. Students will be able to access the course from May-December 31, …
Although many readers may already know, I’d like to announce that Dr. Rob Knight recently moved his laboratory from the University of Colorado at Boulder to the University of California at San Diego. This has been an exciting move for Rob and those in his group. The laboratory is now physically located in the brand …
Nearly a year ago, Dr. Rob Knight presented an awesome TED talk about the microbiome, which you can view here. The talk is also available on YouTube, if anyone is interested in reading the humorous comments that various people have been making. And, although I plugged this a view months back, you can also pre-order Rob’s TED …
Rob Knight, together with science journalist Brendan Buhler, has written a witty synopsis (entitled “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes”) about the human microbiome and how it affects human life in the form of a TED book, now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The description from Amazon’s webpage is below: “Allergies, asthma, obesity, …
Harper Adams University in the UK recently posted a news article describing some intriguing work being done by Senior Lecturer Frank Vriesekoop, who has been investigating, among a slew of other interesting topics, whether banknotes can transfer bacteria, including pathogens. The original paper (unfortunately, not Open Access) in which his work was reported can be found here. …
The Knight lab has been working hard testing new primers for 16S rRNA amplicon production and its time to share our progress. So far, the 16S rRNA V4 region forward primer (designated 515f) has been paired with five different reverse primers (806r, 926r, 967r, 1048r, and 1391r) to amplify ribosomal RNA from bacteria, Archaea, and …
A great new mini review (“The dual role of microbes in corrosion,” Nardy Kip and Johannes A van Vee) discussing the dual role of microbes in corrosion and corrosion inhibition has recently been published in the ISME Journal. Though not OpenAccess, because the article is so relevant to the built environment community, I wanted to …
Join Dr. Rob Knight for a Reddit AMA tomorrow, September 17, 10-11:30am MT. This will be a great opportunity to ask one of the foremost microbiome researchers in the world about anything and everything related to the human microbiome, the American Gut Project, the Earth Microbiome Project, and, well, anything you can think of related …
Think hotel rooms are gross? An elegant study led by Jack Gilbert, published Thursday in Science Reports, suggests that our resident microbes could help ease our minds on this issue, as they very quickly populate hotel rooms (and houses, more on that below) to make our hotels microbiologically identical to our homes within 24 hours. …