Nearly a year ago, Dr. Rob Knight presented an awesome TED talk about the microbiome, which you can view here. The talk is also available on YouTube, if anyone is interested in reading the humorous comments that various people have been making. And, although I plugged this a view months back, you can also pre-order Rob’s TED …
A couple of weeks ago in San Jose was the inaugural meeting of the Citizen Science Association, “Citizen Science 2015“. I previously posted my thoughts on day one here at microBEnet. On day 2, Holly Menninger, Jenna Lang, and I organized a session entitled “Citizen Microbiology: Engaging the public in the study of invisible life”. …
I wrote a post on the Seagrass Microbiome website yesterday about my struggles with fungal ITS sequencing data which I thought I’d share here as well in case anyone is looking to jump into the fungal fray. To summarize: changing the default method of the QIIME assign_taxonomy.py script from “UCLUST” to “blast” dramatically increased the …
Just was sent this by our grants office: nsf.gov – Funding – Critical Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Science & Engineering – US National Science Foundation (NSF). Seems like this may be of interest to folks working on microbiology of the built environment as there are some serious Big Data …
Quick post here. I discovered this a few weeks ago but just have not had time to write about it in detail or even scrutinize it exceptionally carefully but it seems of interest to the theme here at microBEnet: Invisible City Life: The Urban Microbiome | The Nature of Cities. By Marina Alberti from the University of …
One activity we have been hoping to do more of here at microBEnet is to catalyze the development and sharing and evaluation of course materials (preferably free and open) for teaching about microbiology of the built environment. I confess this is just not my area of expertise so I am going to be writing a …
I’ve gone public with my default QIIME workflow. I hope this will be helpful to some, and I encourage anyone with QIIME skills to read through it to see if I’m missing anything. Brief blog post about it is here: http://jennomics.com/2015/02/20/ipython-notebook-for-basic-microbial-ecology-analysis-using-qiime/ and the notebook is hosted here: jennomics.github.io/QIIMEbyJennomics/
Laura Williams recently posted a great writeup of some of the materials she covered with her microbiology class – specifically focused on microbes in the built environment. It turns out they were reading one of the papers we recently published (!) about how humans can influence the microbes indoors by the way we interact with …
When drainage systems fail, a lot of undesirable effects may follow, from leaks that cause mold to fecal-laden water contaminating groundwater and houses. A study from the Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland found yet another concern we should have about broken or inadequate building drainage. Airflows in pipes can contain aerosolized pathogens and then escape into …
Finally got around to reading “Impacts of Flood Damage on Airborne Bacteria and Fungi in Homes after the 2013 Colorado Front Range Flood” from the labs of Shelly Miller and Noah Fierer. The massive floods in 2013 provided the researchers with an opportunity to examine the lingering effects of flood damage, even post remediation. Ideally …