Don’t Cry. Don’t Raise Your Eye. It’s Only Microbe Wasteland

These will almost certainly be of interest to the MoBE community.  There is a new paper in mSystems “Geography and Location Are the Primary Drivers of Office Microbiome Composition” by John Chase, Jennifer Fouquier, Mahnaz Zare, Derek L. Sonderegger, Rob Knight, Scott T. Kelley, Jeffrey Siegel, J. Gregory Caporaso.  I found out about the paper via …

Next Phase of Sloan Plumbing Microbiome Journey! Brain-eating Amoebae and Recycled Water

Sloan has just renewed our funding to build on our foundational research at Virginia Tech that has established general factors broadly shaping the composition of the premise plumbing microbiome!  In this next phase we will focus on shifts in water chemistry and temperature, using brain-eating amoebae as a key exemplar (need to protect those brains!).  …

Journal Club: Crowdfunding Science

What is better than Open Access?! Citizen Science AND Open Access! The March issue of JMBE was all that. You have probably already heard of Kittybiome and/or The Koala Project, 2 ongoing projects in the Eisen Lab. Both projects were featured in the paper, “Crowdfunding Campaigns Help Researchers Launch Projects and Generate Outreach”, published in …

Microbiome Art by Joana Ricou

We’ve written about Joana Ricou before on this blog, and here she is again. This time with an exhibit featuring oil paintings representing human bodies and their microbiomes. The linked article also includes a video of Ricou discussing her work, which has been featured on the cover of a scientific journal and strives to combine science and art in …

Organizing 2017 MoBE conference, call for community input

We are kicking off planning for a two day fall 2017 MoBE meeting in Washington, DC to promote and celebrate the scientific achievements of the MoBE project. The MoBE 2017 meeting will engage the broader research and governmental community to champion the scientific endeavors of the MoBE program, highlighting scientific achievements and novel understandings gained …

A microbiology of the built environment April Fools’ joke

Well I am sad I missed this yesterday but there was an April Fools’ joke published in the Western University Gazette that had a microbiology of the built environment angle. “We’re holding Ivey business classes in there to decontaminate the premises,” Chakma said. Source: English Department relocated to broom closets | Spoof | westerngazette.ca “There …

Sloan Microbiology of the Built Environment Data Analysis Workshop (secrets of QIIME, VAMPS and QIITA) April 4-5, 2016 University of California, San Diego

We are excited because the response to the announcement of the workshop has been awesome! We are expecting approximately 30 grad students and post docs visiting from a wide range of esteemed institutions who besides getting to enjoy sunny San Diego will be getting hands-on training on the secrets of QIIME, VAMPS, and QIITA. To …

A Figshare Collection on Microbiology of the Built Environment

I got an email the other day about a new feature at Figshare.  It was about a new feature they have called “Collections“. But before I describe that I should probably describe Figshare.  Figshare is a repository for depositing and sharing various digital objects including not just Figures (which they name kind of implies … …

Top 50 most wanted fungi

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, …