OK, so they are not actually gigantic bacteria. But this is just really a great idea: The Colosseum becomes a living artwork — powered by its own bacteria | Art and design | The Guardian Now the arena — or rather, the bacteria within it — is becoming a living artwork for the first time, over …
When I first started trying to do PCR in Colleen Cavanaugh‘s lab in 1989, I was kind of on my own. Colleen was a newly hired profession at Harvard. She was busy getting things set up. And I was the only person in the lab – and I really knew very little. And basically I …
This seems like a really good opportunity for some interesting and critically important microbial diversity work: Novel Approaches to Characterizing and Tracking the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance | Grand Challenges This link is to a call for proposals from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Antimicrobial Resistance. Specifically they write: We are soliciting …
Nice article about the MBL Microbial Diversity course and Diane Newman, it’s new director, the in MBL Catalyst Magazine. The full PDF of the magazine is here. I have scanned in the part about the course from my copy of the Catalyst. I hope they don’t mind. The course is, in my mind, one of the …
Great to see the White House is keeping going with its commitment to citizen science and crowdsourcing activities. They will be hosting a Web Forum on the topic on September 30th. See Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, For the People, By the People | whitehouse.gov In this they write: Only a small fraction of …
Another paper on how sample processing (and in this case PCR primer choice) can influence microbiome studies. And another one that is definitely worth looking at: 16S rRNA gene-based profiling of the human infant gut microbiota is strongly influenced by sample processing and PCR primer choice. Microbiome 2015, 3:26 doi:10.1186/s40168-015-0087-4 by Alan W. Walker, Jennifer C. Martin, …
A moderately new paper is out that is an excellent example of how biases in DNA extraction can have major impacts on inferences from culture independent DNA studies. The paper is in what I think is a generally non open access journal (Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal) for fortunately has been made open access Source: …
Continuing on my theme of scanning in notes from old seminars of interest. Here is one of definite interest to the microbial diversity crowd. These are notes from a talk by Norm Pace on February 7, 1990. My entire career was massively affected by interactions (mostly indirect) with Pace when I was an undergrad …
I have been going through old files and notes and scanning some of the more interesting things. One thing I personally find fascinating are notes from talks from a whiles back. So I am going to post some of these notes – in a method I call “retroblogging”. Perhaps I will fake-live-tweet these past talks …
OK this looks like it will be really really interesting. Laurie Garrett sent me a link to this announcment about a meeting of the Empiricist League in New York: What are the 15,000 microscopic lifeforms that live on the subway? How disgusting are the contaminants in the Gowanus Canal? Can we use technology to stop …