New research has shown that patients take more than astronomical medical bills away from hospital visits; they take away superbugs as well. This research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine by Jie Cao et al., found that 24.1% of patients moving from the hospital to a post acute care facility had at least one multidrug …
Your weekend update: Microbes and drinking water Diversity of ribosomal 16S DNA- and RNA-based bacterial community in an office building drinking water system – Jenni Inkinen – Journal of Applied Microbiology (See also their 2014 Water Research paper about same system) Next-generation sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA genes (rDNA) and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) was used to characterize …
There is a new report out Tuesday from the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). It is an update of a report issued on February 10, 2016. Alex Alexiev wrote about this error in a microBEnet post: CDC Error in Flooring Report. For more on the corrected report …
Just a quick post on a new paper posted last week at PeerJ. As in the previous post, this is a PeerJ Preprint, meaning it is not peer-reviewed yet. Microbial diversity of extreme habitats in human homes Amy M. Savage​, Justin Hills, Katherine Driscoll, Daniel J Fergus, Amy M Grunden, Robert R Dunn PeerJ Preprints 4:e1874v1 …
The ASM Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education recently released a special themed issue focusing on Scientific Citizenship (table of contents) that was guest edited by Jack Gilbert, Karen Klyczek and Samantha Elliott. In this issue, the editors seek to address the question: How can we engage people in science? And they hope to provide a snapshot of current ideas …
I was casually browsing Twitter yesterday when something caught my eye DNA from dead #bacteria (and extruded DNA) may inflate species counts (depending on protocol). Early DNAse step? https://t.co/YQvUJq10Df – Michael J Wise (@some_wise) March 22, 2016 This Tweet embedded one from Carl Zimmer. Here is the original: The Earth is filled with relic DNA. https://t.co/eJ0lmggmAw …
Microbes and humans Review: The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere – Mark Williams – Earth’s Future (OA) Biospheric relationships between production and consumption of biomass have been resilient to changes in the Earth system over billions of years. This relationship has increased in its complexity, …
So I had two thoughts when I read the article title “Indexed PCR Primers Induce Template-Specific Bias in Large-Scale DNA Sequencing Studies“… #1: Ack! Yet another thing to worry about in the insanely complicated craziness that is 16S amplicon sequencing. #2: I probably shouldn’t be the person to blog about this because I’ve honestly never …
A paper from this past year by GarcÃa-Mena et al entitled “Airborne Bacterial Diversity from the Low Atmosphere of Greater Mexico City” uses culture techniques and 16S sequencing of the air in Greater Mexico City. There doesn’t seem to be as much literature on microbes in the air as there is about other surfaces and parts of …
In this new paper in MycoKeys we present a set of automatically updated lists of the most abundant fungal species hypotheses known from sequence data, but for which little to no taxonomic information is available. If anyone can shed light on the taxonomic affiliation of these species hypotheses, we’d be all ears. Through a “built environment” switch, …