**Please circulate to interested colleagues. Review of applications begins today! The Department of Microbiology and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville invite applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor in the area of Microbial Systems Biology, with a primary appointment in …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week in lab we finally identified our microbes! The past six weeks have been a culmination of lab work, both successful yet sometimes frustrating, to bring us to this point of finally …
The Sloan Foundation gave me one more thing to be grateful for this Thanksgiving: a grant to evaluate the impacts of different surface finishes on the indoor microbiome. My previous work identified a relationship between antimicrobial chemicals and antibiotic resistance genes in dust. This new project will build upon these results using an experimental system to …
Microbes in the city Microbial Community Patterns Associated with Automated Teller Machine Keypads in New York City – Holly M. Bik – mSphere (OA). News coverage at EurekAlert, ScienceDaily, and NYMagazine. (…) Here we carried out a baseline study of automated teller machine (ATM) keypads in New York City (NYC). Our goal was to describe …
Got this by email: ————- Good afternoon – The fourth meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application will be a mostly closed meeting so that the committee can work on finalizing their recommendations and conclusions for the final report, but will …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) This week’s goal was to successfully perform PCR cleanup. Last week we performed gel electrophoresis to determine if there was a positive or negative PCR result. At the end of last week, a …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) The original goal of this week was to perform DNA clean up via a PCR clean-up kit, but unfortunately the kits were on backorder. Thus, the focus of the class shifted to gel …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) Polymerase Chain Reaction Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplifies a small amount of DNA into a much larger amount of DNA within a short time. The purpose of this lab was to prepare the …
Quick post here (h/t to Paula Olsiewski for the link) about a cool-sounding new device for the rapid detection of Legionella. I can’t say that I’m on board with the fanciful claims made in the press release (e.g. “The risk of catching fatal Legionnaires’ disease from air conditioning units has been dramatically reduced“) but the …
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last posts due to some work-related trips and changing jobs. Since last week, I am the new Science Editor at uBiome. So here is a longish post to catch up with papers and news articles on microbes of the Built Environment. Microbes and buildings Popular press: ‘Living buildings’ …