A little update here. Last week a group of us launched a new participatory science project on the microbiome of cats. It is called “kittybiome” and we have launched a Kickstarter fundraiser for the project — more information about the project and how one can get involved can be found at the Kickstarter home page: …
Michael Fischbach was at UC Davis today and gave a very interesting talk. A few of us were Tweeting from the talk and I compiled the Tweets via Storify and this is posted below.
From May 13-14 2015 we hosted a “Live/Dead Workshop” here at UC Davis where we basically discussed a number of issues related to the topic of figuring out which bacteria are alive/viable in a given microbial community. This is particularly important in the built environment where we suspect that many (most?) microbes are dead and …
A Retirement Symposium for Dr. Norman R. Pace from the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder will be held on 4 – 5 June 2015. The symposium is free and open to the public with generous support provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Agouron Institute. …
A recent study from Su et al tests the effects of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) on the amount of culturable airborne bacteria in elementary school classrooms. As expected, they found lower concentrations of these bacteria with UVGI treatment. Only the first page of the paper is available, unfortunately, so perhaps this is already addressed, but it …
There is a new #openaccess paper out that may be of interest to many working on microbes in the built envronment or microbes in air (indoors or outdoors): Challenges and Opportunities of Airborne Metagenomics by Behzad et al. in Gebome Biology and Evolution. There are some useful things in this paper and some strange things but …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: “Fade to Grey” by Visage A new paper in the Journal of Physiological Anthropology touches upon some interesting viewpoints. The paper is called Dysbiotic drift: mental health, environmental grey space, and microbiota, and was written by Alan C Logan. And it’s Open Access, which we all appreciate! The article, which is rather …
Just a quick plug: Jack Gilbert and I are guest-editing a special issue in Microbiome dedicated to Microbiology of the Built Environment. We are now accepting original research, methods, and software article submissions to be considered for the special issue (planned for publication in late 2015). We are looking specifically for work that involves multiple aspects of the …
I admit I was skeptical when I saw this headline from TIME magazine: You Asked: Should I Use Antibacterial Soap? Research shows they offer zero health benefits. But by changing the makeup of your skin and body bacteria, antibacterials may be fostering new health concerns–especially for kids. But the article by Markham Heid is quite …
Nice to see the FDA digging around into this topic: FDA seeks more data on safety of hospital hand cleaners – The Washington Post. Clearly there is some major value in having people at hospitals (and other helath care facilities) wash their hands often – this is a key step in limiting the spread of pathogens. …