Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa – PLOS ONE

Had to post about this recent paper that came out in PLOS ONE, “Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa“.  Obviously we’re thinking a lot about bacterial activity in space, apropos of our Project MERCCURI work. Really the title says it all here.  Biofilms are awesome.  Space is awesome.  Turns out that biofilms in space …

The Saga of the Space Plates, Part 2

Microtiter plate readers are often used for measuring optical density in liquid media, and this is what we were planning to do. However, they are general purpose, programmable instruments, and there’s no rule that says you have to use them this way. It occurred to me that all of our problems stemmed from the difficulties …

The Saga of the Space Plates, Part One

Here is a conundrum: Suppose you want to measure growth rates of bacterial cultures in an aerobic environment, on LB, in 96-well plate format. So, you buy some plates from your favorite supplier, dispense some LB into the wells with a multichannel pipetter, inoculate from whatever your source is, and pop it into your plate …

Project MERCCURI Presentation at NSTA2013

Today our Project MERCCURI team gave a presentation at the National Science Teacher Association (NSTA) meeting in San Antonio.   We talked mostly about the project, but also about ways that teachers could incorporate microbiology of the built environment in their classrooms.  There’s a lot of interest in taking the kinds of work being done in …

Announcing Project MERCCURI (a.k.a Microbes in Spaaaaace!)

(cross-posted from our static page on the project which will be updated as we move forward) Project MERCCURI is a collaboration of microBEnet with the Science Cheerleaders, Nanoracks, NASA, and SciStarter.com. There are three components to the project: 1) Collecting microbial swab samples from the International Space Station (ISS) and examining the microbial communities therein …

Lessons from 2012: Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes

Note from Jonathan Eisen.  This is a guest post from Srijak Bhatnagar a microbiology graduate student at UC Davis. Some of the best conferences arguably are the small one. Instead of the grand size and rapid pace, these warm gatherings over a period of few days allows for budding researchers like me to listen to …