New papers on microbes inside homes and musea, drinking water systems, during spa treatment, and in an urban estuary. Indoor air Relative and contextual contribution of different sources to the composition and abundance of indoor air bacteria in residences – Marzia Miletto and Steven E. Lindow – Microbiome (OA) We investigated the source-sink relationships of …
In this recent segment on Science Friday, Ira Glass interviews Stuart Firestein about how failure in science is not just inevitable, but is just as important to the advancement of knowledge as the success is. I know that every single person can relate to this idea, which actually applies to far beyond the sciences. I …
Let’s face it, when microbiologists get together over beers 9/10 times the conversation ends up about poop. Or maybe that’s just among the ones I know? Feces provides the critical window into the important world of the gut microbiome, a large percentage of the biomass in feces is microbial and who doesn’t love fecal transplants? …
Behind the scenes: Microbial biogeography of a university campus My name is Ashley Ross (@ashanneross) and, during my final year as an undergraduate student in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo, I began to wonder which microorganisms I was contacting on a daily basis while on campus. Every day on my way …
Blog post prepared jointly by Andrew Doxey (@acdoxey) and Josh Neufeld (@joshdneufeld) The “aquariome” Back in 2013, as part of a project assessing aquarium microbial communities and their role in nutrient cycling, Laura Sauder (graduate student in the Neufeld lab) sequenced a shotgun metagenomic library from a freshwater aquarium biofilter that was installed on this …
Here is a new set of papers that came out in the past week(s) that I posted at MicrobiomeDigest, but that I also wanted to share here. Three of these papers are from BMC’s Microbiome journal, which recently has published several other built environment microbiology papers, so it’s worth checking out. Microbes in buildings Moisture …
A review by Maddox et al came out earlier this year on antimicrobial resistance in horses. Livestock are a common source of antimicrobial resistance genes since so many antimicrobials are used on a regular basis to raise these animals. Too slowly, laws are coming into place restricting antimicrobial use in livestock so that only when animals are …
Posting this which I got from Jason Stajich I am passing along this request from the EuPathDB/FungiDB team. There are opportunities for UK and US placement of a person. Please feel free to forward to suitable candidates. There is hope that a person with fungal biology experience who wants to focus on outreach and community …
Designers Martin Krzywinski and Barbara Jeannie Hunnicutt provide a peek behind the scenes, and explain how they developed a data visualization based on bacterial genome information derived from dust. Source: The Evolution of a Scientific American Infographic: Secret Life in Household Dust – Scientific American Blog Network This is an absolutely fascinating look behind the …
What’s new in the intersection of microbiology and human use of the environment? Here are some recent papers and their abstracts. The first paper is important because it describes the microbiological conditions of the waters that will be used in the 2016 Olympics: Environmental and Sanitary Conditions of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro – Giovana …