I recently came across this detailed review “Metanalysis: Cleaning Hospital Room Surfaces to Prevent Health Care—Associated Infections” from the Annals of Internal Medicine. I think this is a fascinating topic because hospitals have to walk such a fine line with regards to microbes. On the one hand they want to avoid the probably counter-productive “kill …
I’m enjoying making maps of participants for kittybiome, a new participatory research project on the microbiome of cats. It was very easy to make this map using Google Maps. (And using Google Maps is particularly appropriate for the project because we have a celebrity cat named NDA, who lives with inventor of Google Maps participating in the project.) Here …
I have just discovered a nice microbiology themed podcast from the Society for General Microbiology. The podcast is linked to the “Microbe Post” blog and is called “Microbe Talk Extra”. Here is the most recent one on antimicrobials in water and the environment.
There is an interesting paper out a few days ago in PeerJ: MetaBAT, an efficient tool for accurately reconstructing single genomes from complex microbial communities. By Dongwan D. Kang, Jeff Froula, Rob Egan, Zhong Wang​. The key to what they do in the paper is summarized in Figure 1: The legend is below: There are three preprocessing steps before MetaBAT is …
According to a recent BBC news article, NASA is doing a Mars simulation project to see if six live human beings can survive being isolated in a dome together. From a MoBE perspective, it would be cool to study this system. It’s completely closed to outside microbes – the people living in this dome have to …
I got this email a few days ago from Jed Fuhrman. He had sent it to a group of people working on mcirobial diversity and he encouraged people to share it. I asked and he approved posting it here and I thought it would be of interest. (The image above is from Lane et al. 1985 …
This is one of those stories / articles / posts that simultaneously fascinates me and freaks me out a bit and for which I fluctuate wildly between those two points of view: bioME – RSA Human By Nature Entry on Behance By Candice de Aguiar Her basic design idea here is to allow for more microbial diversity …
There is an interesting and potentially important new paper out from Caitlin Proctor, Marc Edwards and Amy Pruden: Microbial composition of purified waters and implications for regrowth control in municipal water systems in Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology. The abstract is below:
A new paper in Frontiers in Microbiology reports the effect of plants on microbes in the environment. It’s about a plant in a box, so if you like cheesy 80’s music, you could play the song Living in a Box from the band with the same title. Here is the study: Microbiome interplay: plants alter microbial …
Mental health and its possible relation to the microbiome is a controversial topic in today’s news. Here’s new research suggesting that schizophrenia may be linked to the oropharyngeal microbiome, as the study found “high-level differences” in bacteria of people diagnosed with the disorder and of those without. If true, this could add insight into the …