Visualizing millions of DNA sequences – in your web browser!

I’ve been remotely following the Sloan MBE meeting discussions (happening in Boulder, CO this week), and yesterday there was a lot of Twitter discussion focused on data visualization tools. How do we make sense of the millions of DNA sequences we generate from microbial ecology projects in the Built Environment? I thought I’d use this opportunity to highlight …

IARPA getting interested in microbial biogeography, citizen microbiology, and more #microBEnet

Well, this is very very interesting: Request for Information (RFI): Ecology Meets Genomics – Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities. IARPA – the equivalent of DARPA for the intelligence agencies – is getting into microbial biogeography (for forensic purposes).  They are seeking comments on the general topic.  From the call: We hypothesize that by correlating the genetic information …

Sloan Foundation Microbiology of the Built Environment Annual Meeting in Boulder #microBEnet

Right now, in Boulder, CO, the Annual Meeting for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment program is happening. More about the program can be found here and here. Alas, I cannot be there this year. But I will be following as much as possible via Twitter. To follow Tweets from the meeting look …

“Crowd-sourced” microbial community info transfer plus link to SIB Bioinformatics Resource portal

One of the unmet challenges to the Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program is the sharing of the results of the Foundation-funded studies as well as other studies of the indoor and built environment microbiome. At the American Society for Microbiology’s annual conference in Boston last week, I was impressed by Pieter …

Postdoctoral Funding Opportunity in Microbiology of the Built Environment

(The following information is taken from the full RFP which is attached here) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announces a funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program. The Foundation seeks to further the development of talented early stage Ph.D. scientists and engineers through the Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) Postdoctoral …

Teaching bioinformatics using IPython Notebooks

I’ve been teaching undergraduate and graduate bioinformatics for three years at Northern Arizona University. This semester I tried an experiment in my undergraduate course: I decided to ditch slides and instead use IPython Notebooks to present my course materials. This turned out to be hugely successful, and resulted in an early version of an online …

AAAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium videos available on-line

Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …

Microbes Can Light Up the World

Researchers at the Japan Science and Technology Agency found in this 2012 study that microbes like Geobacter sulfurreducens and Thiobacillus denitrificans can form small electric grids. These species cooperatively create electric currents through conductive minerals in soil, and can probably do so over a (relatively to microbes) large distance. These microbes and others like them are …