Source: Indoor air 2016 Indoor Air: The flagship meeting of ISIAQ (the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate) will be held in Ghent, Belgium July 3-8 in 2016. The meeting has a Call for Abstracts in the broad area of Indoor Air sciences that is now open. The meeting series is great and I encourage …
Social media has a lot of utilities, but who would have thought it could be useful in tracking down food illness sources? This article from The Washington Post discusses how Twitter and Yelp have been successfully used by health agencies in New York and Chicago to preempt restaurant inspections. Although this is by no means a miracle …
A recent New York Times article by Katie Rogers talks about an odd solution to California’s dwindling water supply. LA county is using small black balls that float on the surface of reservoir water to block UV and heat. This prevents both evaporation and algae growth from occurring. With California’s drought persistently eating away at our …
Here is your song to go with this post: Something in the water by Carrie Underwood. When we drink tap water, we usually don’t really think about the bacteria that might be in there. The quality of drinking water in the US is regulated by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and monitored by regularly testing the water …
Perhaps you’ve heard about Dr. Premsyl Bercik’s recent publication in Nature Communications about the link between the gut microbiome and mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorder. In his study, he induced early life stress in conventional mice and in germ-free mice by separating new born pups from their mother for several hours a …
Some of you may know that we ran a Kitty Kickstarter back in May to start a participatory research project inspired by the American Gut Project only for cats. When you sign up, kittybiome will sequence the gut microbiome of your cat and provide you with the results, so you can see how your cat compares with …
Here are the new papers on microbes in the Built Environment I found this week, about salt-loving bacteria colonizing old houses, viruses in swimming pools, sewer systems, urban water and soils, and microbiota in urban mosquitos. Here is a good ol’ country song to match this post: This Old House by Stuart Hamblen. Paid Access, review: Halophilic microbial communities in deteriorated buildings – …
Here is a recent article about a built environment that hasn’t been characterized before for bacterial diversity: a meat processing plant where sausages are produced. The authors sequenced the V1-V3 area of the 16S rRNA gene to characterize cold tolerant or psychrotrophic bacteria in a refrigerated meat processing plant. Psychrotolerant bacteria are bacteria that are capable of surviving in …
This article on the website of Michigan Radio had an intriguing title. Detective work traces bacteria in Michigan rivers back to leaky septic tanks – Rebecca Williams – Michigan Radio This is a nice story illustrating how the detection of marker bacteria can be used to track contamination of rivers and other environments with fecal matter, …
So – I keep getting asked about this. I am looking for how people are doing DNA extractions from 1000s of samples. Some questions 1. What are the cheapest service providers out there for doing DNA extractions from 1000s of samples? 2. What would be the best way to do this oneself? That is, if you were …