A recent post highlighted issues with analyzing fungal ITS data, and that inspired my labmate Sydney Glassman and me to want to share our experiences with using amplicons to characterize fungal communities. We are very excited that people are interested in delving into the wonderful world of fungi, and we wish to share our love …
Just got pointed (by Laurie Garrett) to this call for proposals from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Addressing Newborn and Infant Gut Health Through Bacteriophage-Mediated Microbiome Engineering. Some key lines from the call: A growing body of evidence suggests that healthy gut function early in life plays a significant role in adult wellbeing. It is further …
This is a short commentary on -omes, in the spirit of reminding. -omes are the collections of all things in a class associated with an instance of another class. For example, all the genes in a single organism is the ‘genome.’ Because of a variety of complexities in the definition of a gene since 1920, …
Although many readers may already know, I’d like to announce that Dr. Rob Knight recently moved his laboratory from the University of Colorado at Boulder to the University of California at San Diego. This has been an exciting move for Rob and those in his group. The laboratory is now physically located in the brand …
Back in October 2013 I wrote a blog post here called “Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 1” where I described the types of building environmental and operational measurements we were making at the time as part of Jack Gilbert’s Sloan-funded Hospital Microbiome Project (Jeff Siegel at the University of Toronto also played a …
This week in eLife, our lab published a study entitled Gut bacteria are rarely shared by co-hospitalized premature infants, regardless of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) development. Spearheaded by a talented Banfield Lab post-doc, Tali Raveh-Sadka, in collaboration with Michael Morowitz’s Lab, the study aimed to find the causative agent in an outbreak of NEC cases that …
This is a quick post to introduce a project I have been developing over the past year and a half, called the Pittsburgh Water Microbiome (PWM) Project. I am aware of some other similar citizen science projects out there, so the goal of this post is to receive some feedback and advice, and open this …
Well, this story is a wee bit disturbing: Deadly bacteria release sparks concern at Louisiana lab. Summary from USA Today: Officials are investigating how a deadly type of bacteria was released from a high-security laboratory at the Tulane National Primate Center in Louisiana. Officials say there is no risk to the public. Many parts of the …
Well, normally I would avoid writing about non open access papers here since I like to write about papers all readers can have access to. But I am making an exception here for the entertainment value of the matter. The paper is: Bacterial transfer to beverages during drinking games: ‘beer pong’ – International Journal of Food …
Healthy Buildings 2015 – Europe PROMO from HB2015Europe on Vimeo.