In our previous 2012 Sloan project “Microbes of the built environment spanning human urbanization” we studied environmental microbes in gradients of transculturation and of urban social stratification at the basin of the Amazon River, from hunter-gatherer villages in Peru, to the modern city of Manaus. The results showed an association between changes in home …
Just saw a posting about this on Twitter by Simon Creer and thought it might be of interest. 4 year NERC freshwater eDNA PDRA now recruiting! Understanding the ecological relevance of eDNA in freshwater lotic ecosystems (NERC Highlight Topic funding) We are looking for a dynamic researcher to fulfil a leading role in a …
For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
A recent news article covers a new company called Cambrian Innovation and their product, a microbial mix that turns brewery waste into clean water and energy. Two California breweries are currently using the product. Energy is produced by burning the methane produced by the microbes as they metabolize waste from the beer brewing process. The water …
Just a quick note to save the date for the 5th Annual Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference to be hosted at CU Boulder from June 1st to June 3rd, 2016. I missed the 4th meeting but the first three were a great opportunity to hear a mix of talks from the various disciples in …
Gearing up the UNITE database for the built mycobiome The team behind the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi has been granted support from the Sloan Foundation to strengthen the support for fungi from the built environment. Launched in 2001 as an ITS database for identification of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the Nordic countries, UNITE …
A recent news article discusses the impact of plant/soil microbiome research on agriculture, specifically helping feed a projected 9 million people in 2050. Novozymes and other corporations are working with researchers and farmers to make microbial products that help promote and optimize plant growth in various ways (for instance, drought tolerance). The idea sounds a bit like …
Just got pointed to this by Norm Pace and it seems of potential interest: The Carl R. Woese Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is proud to announce THE CARL R. WOESE POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM In 1977, Carl R. Woese overturned one of the …
(This is a guest post by Jordan Peccia at Yale University) After a six-month period of home recruitment, surface and aerosol sampling campaigns have begun in an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indoor microbiome sponsored project awarded to Tulsa and Yale Universities. The goal of this proposed research is to explore how two central and modifiable …
Just got emailed this: The USDA Western Human Nutrition Research Center, located on the campus of the University of California, Davis, is recruiting a microbiologist to conduct research on the effect of diet, dietary patterns or specific nutrients on the intestinal microbiota and the relationship of that microbiota to appropriate functioning of the immune system …