Quick post to call attention to this meeting report: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project, Chicago, USA, January 15th, 2013 | Gilbert | Standards in Genomic Sciences. From the paper “This report details the outcome of the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project workshop held on January 15th at the University of …
Puffballs are a type of fungus that is aptly named. You can ‘puff’ their ball-shaped fruiting bodies, and so many spores come out (a large one can contain 7 million), they make a visible cloud. This ostentatious and satisfying practice makes puffballs a popular choice for novice mushroom hunters tasked with bringing in specimens for …
Checking out this new paper from Rachel Adams, Anthony Amend, John Taylor and Thomas Bruns: A Unique Signal Distorts the Perception of Species Richness and Composition in High-Throughput Sequencing Surveys of Microbial Communities: a Case Study of Fungi in Indoor Dust – Online First – Springer. It is open access so anyone out there can get …
This weekend, National Public Radio (NPR) has been heavily promoting a feature on microbiomes scheduled for Monday, July 22nd. If you are a regular listener, you will catch it. If not, you can go to http://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/ on Monday or after and look at the lineup for Monday morning’s show.
Had to post about this recent paper that came out in PLOS ONE, “Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa“. Obviously we’re thinking a lot about bacterial activity in space, apropos of our Project MERCCURI work. Really the title says it all here. Biofilms are awesome. Space is awesome. Turns out that biofilms in space …
Giant piles of plastic floating in the ocean might not be what most people think of when they hear the phrase “built environment”… but hey, we built it! Turns out that this “plastisphere” has it’s own microbiome, distinct from the seawater around it. Not surprisingly of course, but cool that someone is looking. Abstract below, …
In my last two posts I described the process of developing the microbial growth experiment we will be running aboard the International Space Station. We’ve tackled growth assays on 96-well plates in zero gravity, at least in theory. How well will this actually work on aboard the space station? To find out, Jenna, Wendy and …
Quick post here. There is a new paper out of interest to the microBEnet community: PLOS ONE: Monitoring Seasonal Changes in Winery-Resident Microbiota. From colleagues of mine at UC Davis it discusses culture independent surveys of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science Winery at UC Davis. I am running out the door or …
Im a graduate student in Jonathan Eisen’s lab and had a chance to attend this year’s installment of the ASM general meeting was in Denver last month. Among the hustle and bustle of a slew of talks at the ASM-2013, I got a chance to attend the Citizen Microbiology of Built Environment session sponsored by Sloan …
A new report is out from the EPA: Our Built and Natural Environments: A Technical Review of the Interactions Between Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Quality 2nd Edition | Smart Growth | US EPA. This report has very little specifically about microbes but it does have a variety of things of relevance to the microBEnet community …