New papers on Microbiology of the Built Environment, September 25, 2016

Microbes and buildings The Microbiome of Green Design: Sustainable building practices may have unforeseen consequences for microbial communities and human health – Carolyn Beans – BioScience ($40 for 1 day) Just as our bodies teem with microbial life, so, too, do the homes, offices, schools, and other indoor spaces where we spend the majority of our …

Method of interest: precision sequencing of near full 16S rRNA genes on a MiSeq (from @Cath_B & @koadman)  

Definitely worth checking this one (from Burke and Darling) out if you do microbial diversity studies … Background The bacterial 16S rRNA gene has historically been used in defining bacterial taxonomy and phylogeny. However, there are currently no high-throughput methods to sequence full-length 16S rRNA genes present in a sample with precision. Results We describe …

Software of interest: MetaMLST: multi-locus strain-level bacterial typing from metagenomic samples

New software/tool of possible interest: Source: MetaMLST: multi-locus strain-level bacterial typing from metagenomic samples Software: http://segatalab.cibio.unitn.it/tools/metamlst/ Abstract: Metagenomic characterization of microbial communities has the potential to become a tool to identify pathogens in human samples. However, software tools able to extract strain-level typing information from metagenomic data are needed. Low-throughput molecular typing schema such as Multilocus …

Reports from #LAMG16 Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes

Collecting together here some reports from the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting David Coil’s summaries Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16: Day 4 and Random Thoughts Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG16: Day 3 Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day 2 Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day  From me microbiology of the Built Environment session …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16: Day 4 and Random Thoughts

Only three talks on the last day.  First up was Jordan Parker “Microbiome Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) Benefit Students and Faculty”.  Great talk about how we need to move from cookbook labs to discovery-based research, talked about the “I Microbiologist” textbook.  The challenge is to scale research to class-sized groups.  She described the competency-based …

microbiology of the Built Environment session at Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting

microBEnet sponsored a “Microbiology of the Built Environment” session at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting earlier today. The schedule for the session is below Rachel Dutton University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA “Genetics and Genomics of the Simple Microbial Communities from Cheese” Elizabeth Hénaff Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY “The Microbiome …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG16: Day 3

First up today was Rachel Dutton talking about “Horizontal gene transfer in Cheese”.  She began by talking about cheese as a great model system for understanding the principles behind microbial community formation.  Many replicates, controlled conditions, manipulable etc.  After doing initial 16S/ITS survey they cultured representatives of all the dominant genera in the cheeses and …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day 2

Esther Singer opened the day talking about “Metagenomics to Reveal Correlations between Switchgrass Ecotypes and their Microbial Communities”.  She told a nice story about the ecotype-specificity of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere microbial communities.  I was surprised that for some bacteria this was evident even at the phylum level… so big differences. Daria Van Tyne “Changes …

Gut Check: The Microbiome Game now available for purchase

So 18 months after we released the free, print-at-home version of Gut Check: The Microbiome game we finally have a commercial version!  The game is available from MOBIO Laboratories here, for the very reasonable price of $20 with free shipping.  For a really nice write-up about the game, check out this blog post from Anne …