Microbes in the house Fungal and bacterial growth in floor dust at elevated relative humidity levels — Karen C. Dannemiller — Indoor Air ($6 to rent, $38 to own) Under sustained, elevated building moisture conditions, bacterial and fungal growth occurs. The goal of this study was to characterize microbial growth in floor dust at variable …
Imagine a city skyline — what do you see? Skyscraper peaks, metallic sheens, sand-colored stones, rusty brickreds, dirty white plaster, glinting windows? That is a lot of surface area! I am curious about what can be eking out a living on all of these different surfaces, and how it might be contributing to urban ecosystems. In …
A few weeks ago we wrapped up Spring Quarter here at UC Davis and the end of our experimental “Swabs to Genomes” class, taught as a freshman seminar. As we introduced here, the idea was to take a set of students from colonies on a plate (from a swab) through a collection of ready to …
Noticed Paula Olsiewski’s post about upcoming Wikipedia edit-a-thons for science and wanted to share it here. To celebrate the Wikipedia Year of Science, the Wiki Education Foundation is presenting a series of ‘edit-a-thons,’ workshops and invited talks at conferences throughout the year, presented in partnership with major scientific societies. You can check out upcoming events here, including next …
Back in September 2014 I was invited to write a book chapter on citizen science in microbiology. After several iterations of the book, the chapter, and the licensing agreement here is the final version. The book came out yesterday, here’s a link to the entire book on Amazon (“The Rightful Place of Science: Citizen Science“) …
Microbes and the city The Metagenomics and Metadesign of the Subways and Urban Biomes (MetaSUB) International Consortium inaugural meeting report – The MetaSUB International Consortium – Microbiome (OA) Also see posts here and here. The Metagenomics and Metadesign of the Subways and Urban Biomes (MetaSUB) International Consortium is a novel, interdisciplinary initiative comprised of experts …
Week 10 was the last week of class (that’s a quarter system for all semester-types out there). In the previous class the students got together in groups and produced “consensus” genome announcements for their groups. In the intervening week, Ashley and I produced a “consensus consensus” Genome Announcement, taking pieces from the various groups. Then …
As posted in this blog last week, an article was published in the ASM Journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy on May 26 that describes the first discovery in the United States of mcr-1 gene, responsible for colistin resistance, in E. coli in a patient with a urinary tract infection. Colistin is considered an antibiotic of last resort because, …
Here’s my report from Day 2 of the Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference in Boulder… the 5th annual and last of its kind! Storify of the tweets from the day below. The opening talk on Day 2 was by Martin Taubel from the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland, “Of house dust and …
The blog posts for the previous 8 weeks were written as group assignments by the students taking this “Swabs to Genomes” class. For the final two weeks of the quarter, I will just briefly describe what we did on those days. Based on the results from Phylosift, A5-miseq, and RAST we made a call at …