This seems like a really good opportunity for some interesting and critically important microbial diversity work: Novel Approaches to Characterizing and Tracking the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance | Grand Challenges This link is to a call for proposals from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Antimicrobial Resistance. Specifically they write: We are soliciting …
Nice article about the MBL Microbial Diversity course and Diane Newman, it’s new director, the in MBL Catalyst Magazine. The full PDF of the magazine is here. I have scanned in the part about the course from my copy of the Catalyst. I hope they don’t mind. The course is, in my mind, one of the …
Great to see the White House is keeping going with its commitment to citizen science and crowdsourcing activities. They will be hosting a Web Forum on the topic on September 30th. See Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, For the People, By the People | whitehouse.gov In this they write: Only a small fraction of …
Another paper on how sample processing (and in this case PCR primer choice) can influence microbiome studies. And another one that is definitely worth looking at: 16S rRNA gene-based profiling of the human infant gut microbiota is strongly influenced by sample processing and PCR primer choice. Microbiome 2015, 3:26 doi:10.1186/s40168-015-0087-4 by Alan W. Walker, Jennifer C. Martin, …
A moderately new paper is out that is an excellent example of how biases in DNA extraction can have major impacts on inferences from culture independent DNA studies. The paper is in what I think is a generally non open access journal (Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal) for fortunately has been made open access Source: …
Three weeks ago I stood in front of the 60 attendees of the STAMPS course and asked, “How many of you are currently working with shotgun metagenomes?” Ten to fifteen people raised their hands. In contrast, almost all had their hands in the air when I asked how many were expecting to work with shotgun …
OK this looks like it will be really really interesting. Laurie Garrett sent me a link to this announcment about a meeting of the Empiricist League in New York: What are the 15,000 microscopic lifeforms that live on the subway? How disgusting are the contaminants in the Gowanus Canal? Can we use technology to stop …
I have just discovered a nice microbiology themed podcast from the Society for General Microbiology. The podcast is linked to the “Microbe Post” blog and is called “Microbe Talk Extra”. Here is the most recent one on antimicrobials in water and the environment.
I got this email a few days ago from Jed Fuhrman. He had sent it to a group of people working on mcirobial diversity and he encouraged people to share it. I asked and he approved posting it here and I thought it would be of interest. (The image above is from Lane et al. 1985 …
This is one of those stories / articles / posts that simultaneously fascinates me and freaks me out a bit and for which I fluctuate wildly between those two points of view: bioME – RSA Human By Nature Entry on Behance By Candice de Aguiar Her basic design idea here is to allow for more microbial diversity …