From the perspective of biothreat detection, one of the biggest questions is “what is the background?”. If you sample the air near a farm, there’s a good bet that you’ll find anthrax (or at least a close relative indistinguishable by a 16S PCR survey). But that’s just because anthrax lives in the soil, not because …
Saw an interesting talk yesterday from Karen Guillemin of the University of Oregon. I made a storification of the Twitter posts from the talk. See it at the end of this post. I note – I think there are some important lessons in the work on germ free animals that could be applied to studies …
Compiling some of the more interesting tools I have seen recently. Some I have plyed with but most I have just looked at the papers briefly. Microbiome | Abstract | VizBin – an application for reference-independent visualization and human-augmented binning of metagenomic data. Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism GrammR: Graphical Representation and Modeling …
There is an abundance of literature on how microbes can obtain antibiotic resistance, but not as much about how antibiotic resistance can spread. Jonathan drew my attention to this article today, which highlights the fact that antibiotic resistance can be spread through the air. While I didn’t find the conclusions all that surprising, I was …
I was recently contacted by a SRA curator to submit the raw pacbio datasets that go with genomes that were deposited to NCBI. I did go through with the submission and will share what I did and my experience doing so. Be prepared to answer a lot of questions regarding your project as well as …
Nice editorial in Indoor Air from Brent Stephen, Rachel Adams, Seema Bhangar, Kyle Bibby and Michael Waring: From commensalism to mutualism: integrating the microbial ecology, building science, and indoor air communities to advance research on the indoor microbiome. In it they present what they view as key findings from recent studies of microbiology of the buiolt …
Crossposting this from my Tree of Life blog. I could spend a lot of time on this website: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu. I found out about it from a Tweet from Dumutriu: Gut #bacteria #microbiome textiles for @edenproject #art commission @tferriss @phylogenomics http://t.co/gOyEKOQM5u pic.twitter.com/BzwyvKIZC2 – anna dumitriu (@AnnaDumitriu) January 18, …
Nice story worth reading in New York Magazine by Ferris Jabr: Uptown Mice Are Different From Downtown Mice — NYMag. It discusses some work on evolution in urban environments, including a little bit about work starting to be done on gut microbes of rodents and how they might be affected by urban life. Other things of …
Almost everyone in developed countries uses cosmetics, from body washes to make-up. In the US, the cosmetics industry makes over $56 billion dollars in revenue. As a society, we use a lot of personal care products. And in order for those products to have a useful shelf-life, they contain antimicrobials – no one wants to open their …
Greetings from the Healthy Buildings Conference Committee! We are excited to be hosting Healthy Buildings 2015 America in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products, and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on …