So – we have been having a running discussion with people in my lab about one key issue in microbiome studies – how does one store samples prior to doing DNA extractions and does it matter? As background for those who do not do this kind of work – the general principle behind DNA based …
Saw an interesting talk yesterday from Karen Guillemin of the University of Oregon. I made a storification of the Twitter posts from the talk. See it at the end of this post. I note – I think there are some important lessons in the work on germ free animals that could be applied to studies …
Compiling some of the more interesting tools I have seen recently. Some I have plyed with but most I have just looked at the papers briefly. Microbiome | Abstract | VizBin – an application for reference-independent visualization and human-augmented binning of metagenomic data. Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism GrammR: Graphical Representation and Modeling …
Crosspsting from my Tree of Life blog This is so cool: Tangible Interactive Microbiology for Informal Science Education. Abstract: We present an interactive platform that enables human users to interface with microbiological living cells through a touch-screen, thereby generating a tangible interactive experience with the microscopic world that is hidden to most people. Euglena gracilis, single-celled …
Nice editorial in Indoor Air from Brent Stephen, Rachel Adams, Seema Bhangar, Kyle Bibby and Michael Waring: From commensalism to mutualism: integrating the microbial ecology, building science, and indoor air communities to advance research on the indoor microbiome. In it they present what they view as key findings from recent studies of microbiology of the buiolt …
Crossposting this from my Tree of Life blog. I could spend a lot of time on this website: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu. I found out about it from a Tweet from Dumutriu: Gut #bacteria #microbiome textiles for @edenproject #art commission @tferriss @phylogenomics http://t.co/gOyEKOQM5u pic.twitter.com/BzwyvKIZC2 – anna dumitriu (@AnnaDumitriu) January 18, …
Nice story worth reading in New York Magazine by Ferris Jabr: Uptown Mice Are Different From Downtown Mice — NYMag. It discusses some work on evolution in urban environments, including a little bit about work starting to be done on gut microbes of rodents and how they might be affected by urban life. Other things of …
Quick post here. Just got alerted to this paper by automated searches from Pubchase: Construction of a dairy microbial genome catalog opens new perspect… – PubMed – NCBI. This paper provides a really good example of how researchers interested in microbial ecology of a particular system (in this case, dairies and cheese) can use culturing and …
Well, I made a list. I had written up text justifying everything on this list but I think it is better to just publish the list and then discuss. Any additional suggestions or comments would be welcome. 1. Microbes are small, mostly 2. Microbes are not simple 3. No microbe alive today is ancient 4. …
As someone who uses sequence data for most of my research, I am continually happy with the fact that sequencing continues to get cheaper and easier and faster and bigger and better and more and more and more. Along with such continued advances, sharing the data produced by such sequencing has become somewhat challenging at …