This is definitely worth checking out – a Citizen Microbiology project on the Built Environment From the Good Germs project. More on the project: There is a growing popular and policy interest in the microbiome, and the possibilities of more nuanced or ‘probiotic’ ways of living with germs. To date however there has been limited …
Public fungal sequence data are often not annotated to the degree desirable. This makes it difficult to zoom in on all sequences recovered from some particular country or some specific host. This holds true for the built environment as well – there is no straightforward way to target all fungal sequences generated from, say, bathrooms …
Microbes in subways Bioaerosols in the Barcelona subway system – X. Triadó-Margarit – Indoor Air ($6 to rent, $38 to own) (…) We examined the microbiological composition and abundance in space and time of bioaerosols collected in the Barcelona subway system during a cold period. (…) Multitag 454 pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was used to …
We are excited to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will be sponsoring a symposium at the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) Conference and Global Forum in Washington, DC from Jan 24-26, 2017 (http://www.ncseconference.org/). The 2017 conference has the theme “Integrating Environment and Health” and typically brings together between 1,000-1,200 attendees …
So last Spring quarter Ashley Vater and myself ran a class where we went from abalone feces swabs on the first day, to a draft of a Genome Announcement on the last day… written by the students. With 16 students in the class we ended up with 10 sequenced/assembled/annotated genomes. A full description and summary …
Interesting short new paper in arXiv: [1609.05763] Integrating citizen science with online learning to ask better questions Vineet Pandey, Scott Klemmer, Amnon Amir, Justine Debelius, Embriette R. Hyde, Tomasz Kosciolek, Rob Knight Abstract: Online learners spend millions of hours per year testing their new skills on assignments with known answers. This paper explores whether framing research questions …
Microbes and buildings The Microbiome of Green Design: Sustainable building practices may have unforeseen consequences for microbial communities and human health – Carolyn Beans – BioScience ($40 for 1 day) Just as our bodies teem with microbial life, so, too, do the homes, offices, schools, and other indoor spaces where we spend the majority of our …
Collecting together here some reports from the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes Meeting David Coil’s summaries Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16: Day 4 and Random Thoughts Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes #LAMG16: Day 3 Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day 2 Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics #LAMG16 Report: Day From me microbiology of the Built Environment session …
Only three talks on the last day. First up was Jordan Parker “Microbiome Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) Benefit Students and Faculty”. Great talk about how we need to move from cookbook labs to discovery-based research, talked about the “I Microbiologist” textbook. The challenge is to scale research to class-sized groups. She described the competency-based …
microBEnet sponsored a “Microbiology of the Built Environment” session at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting earlier today. The schedule for the session is below Rachel Dutton University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA “Genetics and Genomics of the Simple Microbial Communities from Cheese” Elizabeth Hénaff Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY “The Microbiome …