Well, I made a list. I had written up text justifying everything on this list but I think it is better to just publish the list and then discuss. Any additional suggestions or comments would be welcome. 1. Microbes are small, mostly 2. Microbes are not simple 3. No microbe alive today is ancient 4. …
As someone who uses sequence data for most of my research, I am continually happy with the fact that sequencing continues to get cheaper and easier and faster and bigger and better and more and more and more. Along with such continued advances, sharing the data produced by such sequencing has become somewhat challenging at …
So many new tools and methods in microbiome and microbial community studies and it is just really hard to keep up with them. Here are some that have caught my eye recently: PLOS ONE: IM-TORNADO: A Tool for Comparison of 16S Reads from Paired-End Libraries. Jeraldo P, Kalari K, Chen X, Bhavsar J, Mangalam A, …
Summary Two postdoctoral positions are available in Dr. Stepanauskas’ laboratory. One position is focused on the deep evolution of Bacteria and Archaea and the genome content of the “microbial dark matter”. Another position is focused on chemolithoautotrophy in the deep ocean and hydrothermal systems. The hired scientists will be engaged in large, collaborative projects, and …
Nice article on the Your Wild Life blog: Your Wild Life — A Whole New Way of Doing Citizen Science, Maybe. It discusses a collaobration between Your Wild Life and Holly Bik on visuliazation data from the citizen science – microbiome work that has been a part of the Your Wild Life project. The collaboration has involved …
Let’s begin with a little detail on a current viral outbreak and finish with the indoor environment: Since October 17th, 16 NHL players and 2 referees have had confirmed mumps cases. The first diagnosed case was from a Minnesota Wild player, and then 4 other Wild players were subsequently diagnosed as well. Since then, players …
I probably do not have to remind readers of this blog of the widespread impact of microbial life on our world, but what I would like to propose (and reinforce in some cases) is the idea of leveraging the ubiquity of microbiology across academic fields to unite seemingly disparate departments within a university. Here, at …
After way more work than I imagined when we embarked on this project, we are almost ready to submit our first description of a new bacterial species, Kirrobacter mercurialis. Not exactly earth-shattering, given that about 40 bacterial species descriptions come out every month in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM). However, our …
The spread of antibiotic resistance traits is an ongoing and important issue that is poorly studied. This PLoS One study by Lerma et al. is the first to use a culture independent approach to characterize antibiotic resistance traits in the total microbiota present in a goat and lamb slaughterhouse. Lerma et al. found that tetracycline resistance genes (tetA and tetB) and Sulfonamide …
Just a quick post here pointing people to an article of possible interest: Healthcare-associated Infections Keep Industry On High Alert. In the article Sara Marberry discusses some issues relating to microbes and the built environment in hospital design. Among the topics covered are hydrogen peroxide vapor systems, UV irradiation devices, and copper as possible antimicrobials. Also …