Just got this email letter from the American Society for Microbiology and I thought it would be useful and important to share. Please – everyone out there doing work involving potential harmful microbes – redouble your efforts to do that work as safely as possible. And also consider careful the risk – benefit balance for the …
Another really interesting microbial diversity paper in mBio. This one is from Josh Neufeld and colleagues: Multisubstrate Isotope Labeling and Metagenomic Analysis of Active Soil Bacterial Communities. The key thing they did is summarized in their abstract: We incubated samples from three disparate Canadian soils (tundra, temperate rainforest, and agricultural) with five native carbon (12C) or …
Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …
Recently I participated in the Society for Building Science Educators (SBSE) annual retreat (more about this soon). And at the retreat I saw a fascinating presentation rom Richard L. Hayes who runs helps facilitate something called the Building Research Information Knowledgebase (aka BRIK). BRIK is a “collaborative effort of the American Institute of Architects and the National Institute …
The American Institute of Architects are looking for “Educational Proposals” for their 2015 Convention: See Abstract Scorecard. I just put in a simple proposal to have a 60 minute panel discussion on “Architecture and Microbiology”. But maybe someone else out there would want to put together a more comprehensive proposal on Microbiomes and Architecture and Design and, well, lots of other …
Definitely worth checking out this paper from Kyle Bibby’s lab: PLOS ONE: Shift in the Microbial Ecology of a Hospital Hot Water System following the Introduction of an On-Site Monochloramine Disinfection System. A key figure in the paper is Figure 2 which I post here. The figure shows a PCA based clustering of samples based on …
Nice post from Shelly Miller on her blog about why she started using and is still using Twitter: Why I Decided to Join Twitter and Send Tweets | Shelly L. Miller. Shelly is an active member of the “microBEnet” community and I posts a lot of useful information about meetings, science, and related topics at …
Paper of potential interest to the microBEnet crowd: Phylogenetics and the human microbiome. It is a preprint in ArXiv by Erick Matsen. It focuses on the human microbiome but discusses the history of methods for phylogenetic analysis of microbial communities and it is quite good. Thanks to Erick for posting this to arXiv so that people …
Recently, a bit of an uproar occurred when the CDC reported that workers there had been accidentally exposed to the bacterium that causes anthrax. The lesson from this? Well, I think it is simple. Accidents happen. And they can happen anywhere to anyone. No matter how careful one is. A few days ago a friend …
There is an article by Carrie Arnold in the new issue of EHP (Environmental Health Perspectives) should be of interest to some people out there: EHP — Rethinking Sterile: The Hospital Microbiome. In the article, Carrie Arnold discusses Jack Gilbert’s hospital microbiome project, hospital acquired infections, DNA based surveys of microbes, and work from the …