December Mothur Workshop, part 1

Pat Schloss (pdschloss at gmail.com) offers excellent workshops on the Mothur software for analyzing 16S rRNA data for bacteria. He’s just announced the next one (February 8 to 10, 2016 near the Detroit airport). I had the pleasure of attending the December workshop. A diverse and international group attended the workshop, with many folks who are interested in the human microbiome. …

Shifting Focus to the Good Bacteria in Water

Often on this blog, we talk about biofilms in water systems or water-borne pathogens. Even when we discuss the drinking water microbiome, it is seldom with a focus on any particularly beneficial bacteria. Although there has been some discussion about what essentially amounts to probiotics for water, there seems to be little literature in the area …

New Standards for Antibiotic Stewardship

The Joint Commission recently released new standards for antibiotic stewardship for field review. They aim to get more hospitals and institutions thinking about antibiotic stewardship programs and how their prescribing habits affect antibiotic resistance. Although it seems there may be opposition by some clinicians (as there always is with any change), hopefully antibiotic stewardship standards will become …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, December 24, 2015

Happy Holidays!  As I already noted on my MicrobiomeDigest blog, the stream of scientific papers does not seem to take a holiday break, so I will keep on posting new papers here. Clean sweep Potential association of vacuum cleaning frequency with an altered gut microbiota in pregnant women and their 2-year-old children — Ekaterina Avershina …

Nice microbiology of the built environment paper: Sources of indoor air bacteria in residences

Source: Relative and contextual contribution of different sources to the composition and abundance of indoor air bacteria in residences | Microbiome | Full Text Another very useful paper from the Microbiome journal.  This one from Marzia Miletto and Steven Lindow.  Here is the Abstract: Abstract Background The study of the microbial communities in the built …

A must read on indoor microbiology: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment 

2013-5-19MBPF Source: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment | Microbiome | Full Text Really nice new review paper by Aaron Prissin and Linsey Marr. It covers research on sources of airborne microbes including Humans Pets Plants Plumbing HVACs Water damage Dust Outdoor air Really thorough with tons of references and discussion of the …

Near perfect balance in a microbiome paper – hopeful yet no hype: The microbiome of the built environment and mental health

Source: The microbiome of the built environment and mental health | Microbiome | Full Text Andrew J. Hoisington, Lisa A. Brenner, Kerry A. Kinney, Teodor T. Postolache and Christopher A. Lowry When I saw the title of this I cringed a bit, worried that this paper would be overselling what we know about the microbiome and …

Taxonomic Forensics in Metagenomics with In Silico Marker Panels

Introduction In 2013-2014, a metagenomics project called “Pathomap” collected 1,457 swab samples from the surfaces of all active subway stations throughout New York City (NYC), as well as samples from the Gowanus Canal and several parks. Each sample was sequenced to an average depth of 3.6 million reads (paired-end 125 nucleotides), generating a city-wide metagenomic …

New ASM Journal mSystems Inaugural Launch Today

Today marks the inaugural launch of mSystems, a new open access ASM journal on systems microbiology, founded by Dr. Jack Gilbert of Argonne National Laboratory and a Sloan-funded microbiome of the built environment researcher and collaborator to many readers of this blog. The mSystems Senior editorial board is comprised of a team of microbiome experts: …