Worth checking out: Nation’s Largest-Ever Indoor Air Quality Experiment Coming to ‘UTest House’

We will have more about this here at some point but wanted to let people know about it ASAP.  Check out the link below for details on a really interesting indoor chemistry project that is part of the a Sloan Foundation program. UT leads unprecedented experiment aimed at identifying the key causes of indoor air pollution. …

New #openaccess paper of interest: Airplane Cabin Microbiome

  New paper of interest: The Airplane Cabin Microbiome | SpringerLink Abstract: Serving over three billion passengers annually, air travel serves as a conduit for infectious disease spread, including emerging infections and pandemics. Over two dozen cases of in-flight transmissions have been documented. To understand these risks, a characterization of the airplane cabin microbiome is necessary. …

Paper of interest: Predicting antibiotic resistance from full genome sequences 

This preprint seems like it may be of interest to folks: Precise prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli from full genome sequences | bioRxiv Basically, the authors showed that, using a machine learning approach, they can quite accurately predict antibiotic resistance in E. coli from whole genome data. The emergence of microbial antibiotic resistance …

When your space craft cleaning reagents become food for microbes 

This is really fascinating: Source: Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft Hat tip to Elisabeth Bik for posting about this on Twitter So cool: microbes actually feed on the cleaning products. Also cool: undergraduates as authors. Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft https://t.co/ox4kMawHko — Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) June …

A microbial sequencing discussion course built around a paper and a blog post

So – just a quick post for now.  More details to come.  But I wanted to get a little bit about this out there. For a few years I have been teaching a mid-level course at UC Davis on “DNA sequencing based studies of microbial diversity’.  The course has evolved over the years from a …

US Interagency Strategic Plan for Microbiome Research

Some important reading for those interested in microbiomes. NSF’s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country. From NSF: A group of 23 U.S. government agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), have joined to …

Special issue of mSystems: Essays by Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists

This should be of interest to many: mSystems has a whole issue dedicated to essays by “Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists”. Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists Jack A. Gilbert mSystems March/April 2018 3:e00002-18; doi:10.1128/mSystems.00002-18 http://msystems.asm.org/content/3/2/e00002-18   Conflict of Interest Declarations by Contributing Editors of the Special Issue on Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists, Sponsored by Janssen Human Microbiome …

Looks great: 7th Conference on Beneficial Microbes at UW-Madison 7/8-11

Conference announcement: The 7th Conference on Beneficial Microbes will be held at UW-Madison on July 8-11, 2018. The abstract submission deadline is May 2. https://uwmadison.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/BENEFICIALMICROBES/18 The conference was formerly the “ASM Conference on Beneficial Microbes,” with a long history of combining model and natural systems to understand the ecology and functions of host-associated microbes. When ASM …