Useful Q&A and possibility to submit other questions via Undark Magazine. Undark readers have sent us numerous questions, comments, and observations on the Covid-19 pandemic. Our publisher responds. Source: Dear Readers: Fielding Your Thoughts and Questions on Covid-19
See this STAT article for a discussion of a database of scientists offering to help in fighting COVID19. Database is here: Michael Wells, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, created a database of like-minded scientists to connect their skills where they are needed. Source: A call to scientists: Share your bench skills to fight …
A new New York Times article of interest on on the new coronavirus and how long it survives on surfaces and in the air. Article by Apporva Mandavilli with comments from lead author of a new paper on the topic Dr. Vincent Munster and also Dr. Linsey Marr and Dr. Jeffrey Shaman. A new study could have …
(cross posted to the UCD Microbiome SRP blog) What do you get when you combine UC Davis alumni, tomato seeds, and citizen science? That would be Project GASP (“Germ”-ination Alumni Science Project). I didn’t come up with the name, I swear. This project, sponsored and paid for by the College of Biological Sciences at UC …
Interesting preprint worth checking out (note – this is a non peer reviewed preprint). “It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.” Abstract: Mobile phone apps implementing algorithmic contact tracing can speed up the process of tracing newly diagnosed individuals, spreading information …
So if you have access to the Wall Street Journal, this article is worth a look. It focuses on the spread of coronavirus and how open / compact work environments (such as those that have been growing in usage in the tech industry and elsewhere) might make the spread of the virus more rapid than …
There is a new preprint of interest to those interested in SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus spreading around the world. Details: Aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 (SARS-CoV-2) compared to SARS-CoV-1 Neeltje van Doremalen, Trenton Bushmaker, Dylan Morris, Myndi Holbrook, Amandine Gamble, Brandi Williamson, Azaibi Tamin, Jennifer Harcourt, Natalie Thornburg, Susan Gerber, Jamie Lloyd-Smith, Emmie de …
(updated 4/7/20 with revised preprint and publication information) So late last week, the folks at the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon contacted us wanting to write a review of built environment considerations related to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. We worked furiously on it for a couple of days and through the …
So this work is a spinoff of a big project that we were involved in (but almost all of the work was done by Amy Pruden’s lab at Virginia Tech). In the larger project, they examined the genomes of over 100 clinical isolates of Legionella pneumophila, as well as 10 clinical isolates from patients during …
So way back in 2014 a really interesting paper came out about a family of bacteria called Christensenellaceae, which was found to be the most heritable group in the human gut microbiome. Furthermore this group (represented by Christensenella minuta) was furthermore associated with low BMI. Most intriguingly, mouse work demonstrated that the injection of cultured …