We have two new papers out from our lab as part of our microBEnet supported undergraduate genome sequencing project: Lo JR, Lang JM, Darling AE, Eisen JA, Coil DA. 2013. Draft Genome Sequence of an Actinobacterium, Brachybacterium muris Strain UCD-AY4.. Genome Announc. 1(2):e00086-13. doi:10.1128/genomeA.00086-13. Bendiks ZA, Lang JM, Darling AE, Eisen JA, Coil DA. 2013. Draft Genome …
Growing microbes in space sounds cool. Collecting microbes from sporting events is also cool (“excuse me, could I see that basketball after the game?”). Having fans collect samples with a chance that some of them will fly to the space station is a great way to engage people. Put them all together and you get …
(cross-posted from our static page on the project which will be updated as we move forward) Project MERCCURI is a collaboration of microBEnet with the Science Cheerleaders, Nanoracks, NASA, and SciStarter.com. There are three components to the project: 1) Collecting microbial swab samples from the International Space Station (ISS) and examining the microbial communities therein …
(posting this e-mail from USGBC) New Opportunities at USGBC:Thought Leadership and Research on Building Materials Understanding, communicating and analyzing building materials is a critical frontier for the green building industry. Google has recently provided a generous grant to USGBC to, in part, advance thought leadership and applied research in this area. As part of this project, USGBC …
Just out in today’s edition of PLoS Medicine: Adapting Standards: Ethical Oversight of Participant-Led Health Research. The article raises questions (in my mind) about the ethics related to human genome sequencing projects. We ask, what is “informed consent” when you have your genome sequence published? What about your children’s interests, your siblings’, your descendants’ and …
Fun microbiology news this week. The BioBE Center has a new paper that is getting a lot of press. The paper is about microbes and roller derby. Really. If you want the inside story check out the guest post by Ashley Bateman from the BioBE Center on my Tree of Life Blog: The Tree of Life: …
One of our goals at microBEnet is to increase communication and collaboration between people working in the disparate fields that make up the “microbiology of the built environment”. Most of what we’ve posted about in the past relates to general information and events… but we’d also like to host more technical information that would help …
Seems like Legionella has been in the news a lot recently, with more and more outbreaks occurring (see recent posts here, here, here, and here). One of the largest outbreaks was in the VA hospital in Pittsburgh which got a lot of press because it occurred over a entire year and there have been numerous …
We had a site visit from Paula Olsiewski last week. Paula is the Program Officer for the Sloan Foundation program in microbiology of the built environment (and thus our Program Officer for microBEnet). The visit went very well (I think). In addition to discussing many things associated with microBEnet past, present and future we also …
One of our broad goals at BIMERC, the UC Berkeley group funded by Sloan, is to look at what microbes are found indoors and why. We first tackled this in homes and decided to survey in a university family housing complex – in essence, getting replication in the built environment while eliminating potential sources of …