If you have any interest in large scale microbial ecology – either to do it yourself or to make use of the results or to just watch it as it happens, you should read this paper: BMC Biology | Full text | The Earth Microbiome project: successes and aspirations. It outlines the history and goals and …
Just a quick post here. Got alerted to this paper by Google Scholar updates: A Combined Approach to Assess the Microbial Contamination of the Archimedes Palimpsest. And I was drawn into it immediately by the first line in the introduction The transmission of ancient texts through the ages appears to be an almost miraculous event …
You can check out David Coil’s introduction to the project here. The workflow pre-print is hosted by Peer J here. Feel free to check it out! We would love any comments or suggestions. I was first introduced to the swabs to genome workflow project a little over a year ago. I had just started in the …
When a recently published paper entitled “Microbial Sequencing Analyses Suggest the Presence of a Fecal Veneer on Indoor Climbing Wall Holds” showed up in my NCBI digest, I got excited. However, my excitement died a little when I actually read the paper. Most importantly, the title is slightly deceptive, as only 9% of all reads …
Well, here is another benefit of automated Google Scholar searches. I think it is unlikely I would have found these new papers without such searches but these are fascinating and directly relevant to many aspects of work we are doing on Project MERCCURI. A series of papers on microbial ecolog and space travel in the …
Almost exactly a year ago we finally wrapped up our undergraduate project focusing on sequencing and assembling reference genomes from the built environment. This project aimed to take undergrads through every step from starting with a swab to ending with a published genome announcement and data in NCBI. Over the course of the work, we …
Just came across this review from Sharpe et al. at the University of Exeter, UK; “Modifiable factors governing indoor fungal diversity and risk of asthma”. I’ve just skimmed it so far, but it seems to be a good starting place for getting a handle on this topic. I like the emphasis on “modifiable factors”, implying …
Well, just got notified via automated Google Scholar searches of a new book in the NCBI Book collection. This one seems of relevance both to studies of microbiology of the built environment and to some recent news stories: The Airliner Cabin Environment and the Health of Passengers and Crew. It is a report from the National Research Council …
Earlier this week I saw a fascinating talk by Rachel Dutton on the microbial communities in cheese rinds. Rachel is currently a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University and for the last few years she has been studying microbial communities in cheese rinds. She was at UC Davis on Monday to give a talk and it …
Today a colleague sent me a link to a Genome Biology paper entitled “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists.” At first glance, it reminded me of Greg Caporaso’s post about Twitter last month. But as I continued to read, the slight truth behind the premise described in the paper fascinated, …