This meeting is an annual gathering to bring together all of the Sloan grantees, their labs, and other stakeholders in the field to discuss the status of the microbiology of the built environment program. Thanks again to Mark Hernandez and Alina Handorean for all their hard work in putting it together. Note that I will …
Well, I did not know there was a shoe fairy out there but apparently there is. See this post Philly Shoe Fairy: Shoe Science! where the Philly Shoe Fairy discusses participating in our Project MERCURRI. This type of response is exactly why we love the idea of partnering with Darlene Cavalier, the Science Cheerleader, because she has …
Continuing their recent run of articles about microbiology (a summary of such articles can be found on Jonathan’s blog), the NYT just ran another story on the Sloan-funded microbial diversity survey of NY subways. See our previous blog on the topic here.
A great article in the NYT today about the microbiology of the built environment ranging from pillowcases to hospitals to asthma. Includes interviews with Noah Fierer, Rob Dunn, Paula Olsiewski, Jessica Green, Jordan Peccia, and Jack Gilbert. A good link for sending to family and friends that ask “what are you working on again?”
Nice little news story about the Hospital Microbiome project In Nature News: Patients leave a microbial mark on hospitals : Nature News & Comment. The article mentions that Jack Gilbert will be presenting results on this project at the Sloan Foundation meeting on Microbiology of the Built Environment today. Good that I am at that meeting. …
Does heavy drinking affect the bacteria in your living room air? I don’t know, but some work I saw at ASM suggests that it might. At the poster session on Day 3, Valdis Krumins from Rutgers had a poster reporting efforts to understand the effect on airborne bacterial concentrations (or, at least, their ribosomal 16S …
Just kidding; I paid to get in, but this conference is not intended for a research architect/building scientist like me. This was my third ASM meeting, and now I know something approaching 1% of the jargon, so I was able to “mine” the sessions, especially the posters, for built-environment-relevant content. Under the surface of the …
Day 2: Started off the day with the “Microbes in Action! Dynamics of Single Cells to Communities” which included some great talks by Greg Caporaso, Sarah Cobey, Mary Lidstrom, Trina McMahon, and Jeff Gore. The afternoon was a tough call between “Microbiology’s Next Top Model: Predicting the Future with Math and Microbes” organized by Jack …
The first day at ASM was amazing. Started off the morning by attending the “Putting ‘Omics to the Test” session which contained talks by Ed DeLong, David Stahl, Nicole Dubilier, Julia Vorholt, and Thomas Shenk. The overall theme of this session was to look at example where ‘omics data (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, etc.) data was …
Another genome report from our microBEnet project on generating reference genomes for microbes from the built environment is out: Draft Genome Sequence of Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens Strain UCD-AKU (Phylum Actinobacteria). From the paper: Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens strain UCD-AKU was isolated from a residential carpet in Davis, California, as part of a project to produce reference genomes for microorganisms …