Hurricane Sandy and the Microbiology of the Built Environment: Guest Post by James Scott.

(The following is a guest post by James Scott, from the University of Toronto) The receding waters of hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction along the eastern seaboard of North America – demolishing homes and businesses, flooding neighborhoods and transportation systems, disrupting electricity and water supplies. The havoc wrought by Sandy poignantly affirms the brutal …

Videos from QIIME/VAMPS Workshop in Boulder – Huse, Knight, Sogin, Caporaso, and Wendel

For a summary and list of talks from the QIMME/VAMPS Workshop, see here.   Below are the various presentation videos that I recorded at the meeting.     Mitch Sogin talks about the capabilities of VAMPS: Rob Knight talks about the capabilities of QIIME: Sue Huse discusses best practices in marker gene analysis (must-see for new …

New Sloan-funded program in microbiology of the built environment: Curtis Huttenhower, public transit associated microbes

The last of the new Sloan grants is a project called “Transmission and alteration of the human microbiome by urban public transportation systems” which is being managed by Curtis Huttenhower at the Harvard Public School of Health, along with his Co-PI, Jack Spengler. Detailed description below:

People Behind the Science Interviews: James Scott, testing methods for building materials

Next in our “People Behind the Science” series is an interview with James Scott from the University of Toronto. Dr. Scott has recently received a Sloan grant to work on “Improved Testing Methods for Common Building Materials”. In this interview he talks about this project and his interest in the field. Transcript of video:

Meningitis/steroid case highlights desperate need for more studies of microbiology of the built environment

Well, the meningitis outbreak tied to steroid injections gets scarier and scarier by the day: Poor Sanitation Found at Pharmacy Linked to Meningitis Outbreak – NYTimes.com.  One of the latest pieces of news is that the pharmacy that was “compounding” the steroids for injection appears to have been a “microbiology of the built environment” nightmare.  Some …

Websites for the Hospital Microbiome Project and the Home Microbiome Project

I recently posted here about one of the new Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment, the “Hospital Microbiome Project”.  One thing I didn’t mention is that they already have some interesting preliminary results from the construction phase of the project that are worth checking out. Jack Gilbert has also been involved in …

Storify of tweets from QIIME/VAMPs meeting and ITS fungal meeting in Boulder

For those wanting to catch up on the workshop discussions that happened last week in Boulder, we’ve pulled together all the tweets into a Storify! Includes coverage of the QIIME/VAMPS bioinformatics workshop, and the subsequent fungal meeting focused on resources for ITS gene barcoding. [View the story “QIIME/VAMPS and ITS fungi #microbenet meetings” on Storify]

Summary and talks from QIIME/VAMPS Workshop, October 2013 in Boulder

(Note:  This post will be regularly updated with links to speaker slides and videos of some presentations as that information becomes available) The two-day microBEnet sponsored QIIME/VAMPS workshop just wrapped up yesterday.  The goal of this conference was to bring the developers of QIIME and VAMPS together with users from the microbiology of the built …