A new paper “Evolution of the Indoor Biome” is out and should be of interest to many who think about microbes in the built environment and related topics. The paper has quite an incredible collection of authors: NESCent Working Group on the Evolutionary Biology of the Built Environment, Laura J. Martinl, Rachel I. Adams, Ashley …
Well, I have been digging around a lot into Nanopore sequencing recently. This started as preparation for a lecture I gave at the Bodega Applied Phylogenetics course a few weeks ago on “The Evolution of DNA sequencing.” In preparation for my talk I posted my slides from last years talk and asked people on Twitter …
There is a new paper out that may be of interest to many: “When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement”. It discusses an analysis of paleogenetics and the open science / open data practices in the field. This seems like it could be of relevance to the …
Wow – this is really really cool: Hidden Life Forms: Investigating Microbial Diversity on Our Bodies and in Our Homes. The article is by Jennifer Cutraro and it goes through a series of course / learning activities regarding microbial diversity – of homes and of people. It has things like: a warm up activity a pre-activity …
Aaron Darling, faculty member of University of Technology Sydney (who used to work with me here at UC Davis) has a very important and interesting read on his blog: Not so fast, FastTree. In it he discusses some informatics archaeology he did (digging around in some code) regading the program FastTree which many researchers have been using …
Really interesting and distressing story in the New York Times a few days about: A Luxury Liner Docks and the Countdowns On by Jad Mouawad. So many parts of this story have microbe-themed angles. Some interesting tidbits (quoted from the story) A treatment system handles all the wastewater generated by the passengers and crew. That system, which …
We will be hosting a screening of “Resistance the film” at UC Davis. April 9, 2015 6: 00 PM (reception from 6:00-6:30) Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility Auditorium Davis, CA The filmmaker Michael Graziano will be there. Reviews have been very positive. See for example Washington Post Slate Vox WIRED See the first two minutes of …
Really nice collection in the journal RNA for their 20th anniversary. So many interesting things here on the RNA world, RNA ctalysis, RNA structure, RNA function and more. Although all of these papers in some way relate to the work I do on sequencing and analyzing microbial genomes and metagenomes, a few of of particular …
Wow. This is one of the worst germophobia driven articles I have seen in a long long time: 7 Everyday Items That Are Harboring Germs. Brought to you from GrandParents.Com — by Linda Rodgers — and posted at the Huffington Post. This one is loaded with really just silly stuff like: “But there’s a slew of stuff …
OK that was deceptive of me. This is not a draft paper. But it is a paper about drafts – beer that is: Mapping microbial ecosystems and spoilage-gene flow in breweries highlights patterns of contamination and resistance | eLife. And, well, I am a bit biased since it came from UC Davis colleagues, but it …