Going through some old draft microBEnet posts and came across this one, “Taking Aim at Microbes on Farm Good Strategy for Food Safety | Food Safety News”. This is a nice article about microbiological control at food production facilities… but that doesn’t just focus on the (justifiably) scary antibotic resistance breeding ground angle. This article …
As many of you know, parts of Yosemite national Park closed this passed week because of several cases of the plague. For most, the plague comes with the stigma of being an extremely deadly disease. But for others, the plague spells out a quite fascinating story of infectious disease. Secretions by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis …
A number of cooling towers around the Bronx have been found to be the source of a Legionella outbreak. A number of buildings in the area tested positive for contamination, including a drug manufacturer (thankfully the medicine was not contaminated, at least according to the company representatives). Legionella is a waterborne pathogen that can grow in …
Social media has a lot of utilities, but who would have thought it could be useful in tracking down food illness sources? This article from The Washington Post discusses how Twitter and Yelp have been successfully used by health agencies in New York and Chicago to preempt restaurant inspections. Although this is by no means a miracle …
I saw the tweet below from James Scott first thing this morning, linking to a NY Times article about the tragic balcony collapse in Berkeley, CA two days ago: Fungi to blame for fatal Berkeley balcony collapse, via @nytimes http://t.co/MLWX24x4Z1 – James Scott (@jscott_toronto) June 18, 2015 From the article: The engineers said photographs taken by …
“Microbiome” is such a hot term these days. And one key question many ask is “what does it mean?” A related question is – “where did the term come from?” I tried to tackle this many years ago on my blog with a post: The human microbiome – term being used in many ways – but at …
Dear metagenome method developers, The first challenge of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) begins right now! Over the last three months, we received valuable feedback from the community playing with our toy data sets. We incorporated many of your suggestions, thanks again! Today, we proudly release the official data sets …
Microbiomes are everywhere. Not only inside and around us, but also in the scientific literature. Not too many years ago, only a handful of microbiology laboratories were analyzing the composition of the invisible communities that surround us. Today, it feels as if every other scientist is doing something microbiome-related. New techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and …
A recent post highlighted issues with analyzing fungal ITS data, and that inspired my labmate Sydney Glassman and me to want to share our experiences with using amplicons to characterize fungal communities. We are very excited that people are interested in delving into the wonderful world of fungi, and we wish to share our love …
This is a short commentary on -omes, in the spirit of reminding. -omes are the collections of all things in a class associated with an instance of another class. For example, all the genes in a single organism is the ‘genome.’ Because of a variety of complexities in the definition of a gene since 1920, …