For a summary and list of talks from the QIMME/VAMPS Workshop, see here. Below are the various presentation videos that I recorded at the meeting. Mitch Sogin talks about the capabilities of VAMPS: Rob Knight talks about the capabilities of QIIME: Sue Huse discusses best practices in marker gene analysis (must-see for new …
Greetings from the 2012 ASM Beneficial Microbes Conference held in beautiful San Antonio (Ill ignore the torrential downpours from Friday for the moment). Despite the more restricted theme, at least compared to the ASM general meeting, the organizers did a great job of inviting a broad variety of speakers. Of course, we heard about insect …
Well, the meningitis outbreak tied to steroid injections gets scarier and scarier by the day: Poor Sanitation Found at Pharmacy Linked to Meningitis Outbreak – NYTimes.com. One of the latest pieces of news is that the pharmacy that was “compounding” the steroids for injection appears to have been a “microbiology of the built environment” nightmare. Some …
I recently posted here about one of the new Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment, the “Hospital Microbiome Project”. One thing I didn’t mention is that they already have some interesting preliminary results from the construction phase of the project that are worth checking out. Jack Gilbert has also been involved in …
For those wanting to catch up on the workshop discussions that happened last week in Boulder, we’ve pulled together all the tweets into a Storify! Includes coverage of the QIIME/VAMPS bioinformatics workshop, and the subsequent fungal meeting focused on resources for ITS gene barcoding. [View the story “QIIME/VAMPS and ITS fungi #microbenet meetings” on Storify]
(Note: This post will be regularly updated with links to speaker slides and videos of some presentations as that information becomes available) The two-day microBEnet sponsored QIIME/VAMPS workshop just wrapped up yesterday. The goal of this conference was to bring the developers of QIIME and VAMPS together with users from the microbiology of the built …
The dates of May 22-24th were set today at the end of the VAMPS/QIIME workshop in Boulder (more about that later). The dates have been choose to coordinate with ASM 2013, which is in Denver from May 18-21st. Anyone attending ASM should just be able to take a shuttle up to Boulder for the Sloan …
Heard about an interesting paper today (sadly not open access) describing airflow simulations in an aerosol chamber. Basically they showed that if you release bugs from a mannequin, they spread all over the room… up to 3.5 meters away. A worthwhile study, but not something that wasn’t known already. What made this get so much …
The Virginia Tech group has published another paper looking at the impacts of indoor environmental conditions on microbes. In this case, it’s potentially a key clue to the on-going search for an explanation to the seasonality of influenza puzzle. It’s not just airborne humidity but also the droplet. composition that matter. Past efforts to find …
Going for a walk or drive in the country and viewing the fall colors when the leaves turn in the Boston area is a favorite pastime of residents of and visitors to the area. Leaf mold associated with autumn leaves in Massachusetts may have gotten into the indoor environment of the New England Compounding Center …