I admit, I am intrigued by the use of baby cages in recent history. Under what circumstances is outdoor air better than indoor air – from a microbial exposure perspective – is an ongoing and fascinating question. The image of a baby hanging out a window in a chicken-wire cage graphically encapsulates that debate. Talk of baby cages …
“Microbiome” is such a hot term these days. And one key question many ask is “what does it mean?” A related question is – “where did the term come from?” I tried to tackle this many years ago on my blog with a post: The human microbiome – term being used in many ways – but at …
This is the third of three posts about the planetary protection workshop I attended at NASA Ames from March 24-26, 2015. The first is here. I mentioned, in my last post on forward contamination, that reverse contamination is the primary concern for Planetary Protection (PP). In this context, reverse contamination refers to the transport of Martian …
A recent NPR article raised the concern of drug-resistant food poisoning. Specifically, Ciprofloxacin-resistant Shigella. This strain was imported with US travellers coming from all over the world, but has now spread around the nation. Doctors are now starting to treat multi-drug resistant Shigella using IV instead of oral antibiotics. The article states: Multidrug-resistant Shigella has caused several outbreaks …
Just got wind of this upcoming meeting, “Microbes in the City: Mapping the Urban Genome” that looks like it has a fantastic series of talks lined up. The meeting is a single day, June 19th, and is hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences and New York University. From the conference website, here’s the …
I gave a talk recently at the Future of Genomic Medicine meeting in San Diego that I thought might be of interest to some here. I posted the slides to Slideshare. See below: Talk for #FOGM15: Challenges and Opportunities in Microbiome Studies and the Rise of Citizen Microbiology from Jonathan Eisen I also recorded the …
Many of us are familiar with the story of the wolves in Yellowstone that scare away hungry elk herds from tasty young willows (although the ecology of Yellowstone is probably more complicated than that). Nonetheless many ecologists are keenly interested in what has been termed the ecology of fear in communities of plants, birds and mammals. The ecology of fear describes the role of …
So I just saw this news story: Lawrence Tynes sues Tampa Bay Buccaneers claiming MRSA infection ended career. It seems that Tynes and some others think MRSA is lurking in the Tamba Bay Buccaneers facilities. This is yet another example of a sports league in need of a microbial ecologist. Lots of interest in Sports and …
Last week, I came across a paper in PLOS ONE that looked interesting, especially in the light of the recent mBio paper that looked at sewage as a reflection of a city’s human-associated microbiome (also see this recent post on MicroBEnet). In the PLOS ONE paper “The Source of the River as a Nursery for …
Finally got around to reading this paper “Drinking water microbiology – from measurement to management”. Seems like the number of culture-independent studies on drinking water keeps going up, it’s been a popular blog topic here in the last year. This review paper does a good job of summarizing the current state of knowledge, even including …