Source: The microbiome of the built environment and mental health | Microbiome | Full Text Andrew J. Hoisington, Lisa A. Brenner, Kerry A. Kinney, Teodor T. Postolache and Christopher A. Lowry When I saw the title of this I cringed a bit, worried that this paper would be overselling what we know about the microbiome and …
Introduction In 2013-2014, a metagenomics project called “Pathomap” collected 1,457 swab samples from the surfaces of all active subway stations throughout New York City (NYC), as well as samples from the Gowanus Canal and several parks. Each sample was sequenced to an average depth of 3.6 million reads (paired-end 125 nucleotides), generating a city-wide metagenomic …
Behind the scenes: Microbial biogeography of a university campus My name is Ashley Ross (@ashanneross) and, during my final year as an undergraduate student in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo, I began to wonder which microorganisms I was contacting on a daily basis while on campus. Every day on my way …
Blog post prepared jointly by Andrew Doxey (@acdoxey) and Josh Neufeld (@joshdneufeld) The “aquariome” Back in 2013, as part of a project assessing aquarium microbial communities and their role in nutrient cycling, Laura Sauder (graduate student in the Neufeld lab) sequenced a shotgun metagenomic library from a freshwater aquarium biofilter that was installed on this …
Designers Martin Krzywinski and Barbara Jeannie Hunnicutt provide a peek behind the scenes, and explain how they developed a data visualization based on bacterial genome information derived from dust. Source: The Evolution of a Scientific American Infographic: Secret Life in Household Dust – Scientific American Blog Network This is an absolutely fascinating look behind the …
Infants born via c-section have a microbiome community composed mostly of skin bacteria [1-3], but the source of these skin bacteria is unknown. People quickly shed bacteria into their environment, leaving their own bacterial signature in a room within hours [4]. Do hospital operating rooms harbor skin bacteria that could colonize c-section delivered infants? 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 …
Innovation and a dollop of creativity has allowed researchers to make laboratory luxuries a reality in the field. Nowadays, you can do almost anything even in the most remote of areas. For example, the ability to sequence DNA in the field will be possible in the not so distant future. That said, many projects are …
Submitted to me by Rob Knight. Announcement: Sloan Microbiology of the Built Environment Data Analysis Workshop (secrets of QIIME, VAMPS and QIITA) April 4-5, 2016 University of California, San Diego Application Deadline — February 15, 2016 — mitchellsogin@gmail.com This workshop, staffed by the developers of QIIME, VAMPS and QIITA, invite participants from the Microbiology of …
I confess I have not read this yet but it seems like it may be of interest to some out there in the microbial communities community: REAGO: Reconstructing 16S rRNA genes in metagenomic data.