There is a paper that just was published that possibly will be of interest to those interested in studying microbial ecology of drinking water (or other water systems for that matter): Methodological approaches for studying the microbial ecology of drinking water distribution systems. Unfortunately the paper is not freely or openly available. The paper covers many topics …
Well, been having many discussions recently about PCR amplification happening from “negative” controls where no sample DNA was added. Such amplification is alas pretty common – due to contamination occurring in some other material added to the PCR reaction. Obviously it would be best to eliminate all DNA contamination of all reagents and all PCRs. …
If you’ve been reading our posts, you are quite familiar with our efforts at characterizing the bacterial and fungal communities of the built environment. We’ve described our study design, experimental protocols, and results. One thing we may have left you wondering about, however, is the nuts and bolts behind the analyses we and other MoBe …
Posted a request for help on Twitter but I thought it might be of interest to some other people so am also posting about it here. Basically what we (me and Lizzy Wilbanks in my lab) is to take some microbial genomes and to fully annotate all of the repeat elements and all of the …
There is a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology out that may be of interest: Viruses Throughout Life & Time: Friends, Foes, Change Agents. In a way this could be seen as a formal declaration of viral love by a collection of eminent scientists. Mostly I agree with what is in the report, through …
Got alerted to a very interesting paper because I have subscribed to Google Scholar automated updates for Brent Stephens (see a full list of Google Scholar pages for researchers working on microbiology of the built environment here). The paper is: Tools to improve built environment data collection for indoor microbial ecology investigations by Tiffanie Ramos and Brent Stephens …
For those interested in conducting “microbiome” type studies where DNA sequencing is used to characterize and compare microbial communities this could be uf use: Conducting a Microbiome Study by Julia K. Goodrich, Sara C. Di Rienzi, Angela C. Poole, Omry Koren, William A. Walters, J. Gregory Caporaso, Rob Knight, and Ruth E. Ley. It is a good overview …
Just got this email letter from the American Society for Microbiology and I thought it would be useful and important to share. Please – everyone out there doing work involving potential harmful microbes – redouble your efforts to do that work as safely as possible. And also consider careful the risk – benefit balance for the …
Another really interesting microbial diversity paper in mBio. This one is from Josh Neufeld and colleagues: Multisubstrate Isotope Labeling and Metagenomic Analysis of Active Soil Bacterial Communities. The key thing they did is summarized in their abstract: We incubated samples from three disparate Canadian soils (tundra, temperate rainforest, and agricultural) with five native carbon (12C) or …
Quick posting here for a PhD-track job opening in Eindhoven, Netherlands; “Fungal Growth on porous materials: the roles of the water supply”. The job description is below and contact information can be found on the website (no longer available). Job description Introduction Fungi form a unique group of organisms. As holds for every organism, water …