This article, “Urban microbiomes and urban ecology: How do microbes in the built environment affect human sustainability in cities?” certainly gets points for an intriguing title. Though it is sadly closed-access. I haven’t read the whole article, but it’s basically a review of a lot of microbiology of the built environment literature, especially as it relates …
Just a quick post to highlight the upcoming Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in New Orleans, Oct 22-24. Here’s the slightly over the top pitch from the organizers: Greenbuild is the premier event for sustainable building. Featuring three exhilarating days of uplifting speakers, unmatched networking opportunities, showcases, LEED workshops and tours of green buildings in New …
We’d like to first thank Jon for the opportunity to discuss our work in this forum. We recently published a study investigating direct functional annotation of short metagenomic reads that stemmed from protocol development for our lab. Jon invited us to write a blog post on the subject, and we thought it would be a …
Posting this press release I got via email: AIA Foundation, American Institute of Architects and Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Launch Research Consortium on Design and Health Request for Proposals Due October 15 For University-led Research Contact: John Schneidawind 202-626-7457 johnschneidawind@aia.org http://twitter.com/AIA_Media For immediate release: Washington, D.C. — Sept. 16, 2014 — The AIA Foundation, along …
The last full day of the Lake Arrowhead meeting was as awesome as the first two. It must have been incredible to watch microbial genomics evolve over the last 20 years that the meeting has existed… a time span that just covers the first ever bacterial genome to the 100’s or 1000’s of genomes that …
Another great day at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics meeting. The session titles today were “Metagenomics/Pathogens/Antibiotics/Evolution” and “Antibiotic Resistance”. As always, the best summary of the talks can be found in the Storify below. My random notes are here… these are just the things that struck me. Thanks to Surya Saha for the …
Join Dr. Rob Knight for a Reddit AMA tomorrow, September 17, 10-11:30am MT. This will be a great opportunity to ask one of the foremost microbiome researchers in the world about anything and everything related to the human microbiome, the American Gut Project, the Earth Microbiome Project, and, well, anything you can think of related …
Day 1 at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting was as always full of great talks relating to a variety of topics. Officially the session topics were “Microbial Communities I: Microbiomes; Biodiversity” and “Microbial Communities II: Metagenomics/Biodiversity/Natural Products”. Rather than summarize all the talks, I thought I’d embed the Storify of tweets here (thanks to …
We recently submitted a paper to biorxiv on the estimation of average genome size from shotgun metagenomics data and it’s application to the human microbiome (http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2014/09/11/009001.full.pdf). It is currently undergoing peer review. This study was motivated by the troubling observation that many universal single-copy genes appear to vary significantly across metagenomes. How can this be? …
Over dinner the other night, a friend brought up ongoing public health efforts to get people to stop washing raw chicken because it spreads Campylobacter onto kitchen surfaces. I have to confess that I have been washing, drying and salting a raw chicken nearly once a week for years, following Judy Roger’s (Zuni Cafe) fabulous recipe …