Well, this story is a wee bit disturbing: Deadly bacteria release sparks concern at Louisiana lab. Summary from USA Today: Officials are investigating how a deadly type of bacteria was released from a high-security laboratory at the Tulane National Primate Center in Louisiana. Officials say there is no risk to the public. Many parts of the …
Laura Williams recently posted a great writeup of some of the materials she covered with her microbiology class – specifically focused on microbes in the built environment. It turns out they were reading one of the papers we recently published (!) about how humans can influence the microbes indoors by the way we interact with …
Almost everyone in developed countries uses cosmetics, from body washes to make-up. In the US, the cosmetics industry makes over $56 billion dollars in revenue. As a society, we use a lot of personal care products. And in order for those products to have a useful shelf-life, they contain antimicrobials – no one wants to open their …
In just over a decade, metagenomics has developed into a powerful and productive method in microbiology and microbial ecology. The ability to retrieve and organize bits and pieces of genomic DNA from any natural context has opened a window into the vast universe of uncultivated microbes. Tremendous progress has been made in computational approaches to …
As someone who uses sequence data for most of my research, I am continually happy with the fact that sequencing continues to get cheaper and easier and faster and bigger and better and more and more and more. Along with such continued advances, sharing the data produced by such sequencing has become somewhat challenging at …
Just a quick post here. Some may have noticed that more of the posts here at microBEnet than say, a year ago, are not focused explicitly about “microbiology of the Built Environment” (MoBE). They are instead sometimes focused on microbiology, history of microbiology, architecture, methods in microbial ecology, bioinformatics tools, and more. There is a reason …
Join Dr. Rob Knight for a Reddit AMA tomorrow, September 17, 10-11:30am MT. This will be a great opportunity to ask one of the foremost microbiome researchers in the world about anything and everything related to the human microbiome, the American Gut Project, the Earth Microbiome Project, and, well, anything you can think of related …
Recently I participated in the Society for Building Science Educators (SBSE) annual retreat (more about this soon). And at the retreat I saw a fascinating presentation rom Richard L. Hayes who runs helps facilitate something called the Building Research Information Knowledgebase (aka BRIK). BRIK is a “collaborative effort of the American Institute of Architects and the National Institute …
Recently Brent Stephens from the Built Environment Research Group asked me what the most popular posts on microBEnet have been to date. I was intrigued, so decided to do some digging in Google Analytics and share the results. One thing worth noting is that the top 10 blog posts were scattered among the top 40 …
The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …