A few weeks ago we wrapped up Spring Quarter here at UC Davis and the end of our experimental “Swabs to Genomes” class, taught as a freshman seminar. As we introduced here, the idea was to take a set of students from colonies on a plate (from a swab) through a collection of ready to …
Over the last several years our lab has spent a fair bit of effort on collecting and sequencing genomes of bacteria from the built environment. Genome sequences are useful for a number of reasons including facilitating metagenomics and understanding the actual metabolic capacity of particular microbes. In particular we hope that genome sequences will facilitate …
microBE.net is an awesome name, so I wasn’t that surprised to find that the CDC has it’s own MicrobeNet that they launched in 2013. MicrobeNet is a free online curated database of emerging bacteria and fungi that aims to improve reference diagnostics and pathogen identification. The database includes genetic sequence data (16S rRNA), biochemical data, morphological characteristics and antibiotic resistance profiles for about 2,400 species, as well …
Urban Metagenomics International Meeting Coming Soon! We are accepting abstracts and poster proposals for the 2016 MetaSUB Consortium Meeting (Metagenomics and Metadesign of Subways and Urban Biomes) until May 30. For details, please see our EventBrite Page here. The meeting takes place at Fudan University in Shanghai, China on July 1-2. Registration for the International …
The six finalists for the Open Science Prize were announced today. The Open Science Prize is “The Open Science Prize is a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to unleash the power of open content and data to advance biomedical research and its …
Videos of talks from the recent DOE-JGI User Meeting have been posted. There is also a Storify wrap up of the meeting: [<a href=”//storify.com/doe_jgi/2016-doe-jgi-genomics-of-energy-environment-meetin” target=”_blank”>View the story “2016 DOE JGI Genomics of Energy & Environment Meeting” on Storify]
Ok I saw this Tweet and I thought it sounded cool: Autonomous Sewer Robots Live-Stream Neighborhood Microbiome Data – Nickolaus Hines https://t.co/fr8Xfs8XxQ pic.twitter.com/e5mDTGU44Y – Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) May 5, 2016 And definitely worth looking into in more detail. And, well, after looking I still think it is cool but not quite what the headline suggests. …
On April 11 there was a meeting in Washington DC that was part of an effort from a new study being conducted by the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment”. Videos and slides from the meeting have now been posted. I have compiled them below. In addition, I …
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 …
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!). …