Travel Grant for Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application meeting

Travel Grant Opportunity – Attend Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application October 17-18, 2016 in Irvine, California The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are conducting a study on the formation and function of microbial communities in built environments and implications of this knowledge for building design and operations to impact sustainability …

Wish I were going: ISME-International Society for Microbial Ecology – Aug 21-26 #ISME16

Sadly I am not able to go to this this year but it looks really good.  21-26 August 2016 | ISME-International Society for Microbial Ecology. Lots of great sessions and speakers.  Follow along via Twitter hashtag #ISME16. #ISME16 Tweets !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

The Jefferson Memorialome? The Jeffersonome? The Jefferson Microbiome? A biofilm by any other name …

Who wants a new project?  Seems like they could use some microbiology of the built environment experts to provide additional help on this one:  Officials fret as fungi, algae and bacteria leave growing stains on hallowed stone. Source: A grimy, black biofilm is starting to cover the Jefferson Memorial, and it can’t be killed – …

Today & tomorrow – live webcast – Standards for Microbiome Measurements @NIST

Definitely worth checking this out. NIST is running a meeting on Standards for Microbiome Measurements From the site: This workshop will seek input on defining reference materials, reference data and reference methods for human microbiome community measurements. This workshop is sponsored by NIST and NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Human Microbiome …

Mick Watson (@BioMickWatson) is on a mission – collecting papers about bias in microbiome studies 

So I just saw this Tweet @BioMickWatson can’t find paper I’m thinking of, but OTU calling software/algorithm matters a lot – David Baltrus (@surt_lab) August 6, 2016 So I went to Mick Watson’s site and saw this: This is my attempt to collate the literature on how easy it is to introduce bias into microbiome …

Diversity of indoor arthropods increases in ‘affluent’ neighborhoods 

There is an interesting new open access paper on urban ecosystems out in Biology Letters: Exoskeletons and economics: indoor arthropod diversity increases in affluent neighbourhoods | Biology Letters No it is not directly about microbes but nobody’s perfect and many of the arthropods they look at are small and the story about biodiversity is (I …

Student theses on microbiology of the built environment of interest

I have some automated Google Scholar searches for MoBE related topics and recently a few theses came up in the searches and I thought I would post about them here Here is one: Indoor biological exposures : what can HVAC filter dust tell us? Author: Jennings, Wiley Charles from Kerry Kinney’s lab. Abstract: Because people in the US …