CURES Workshop Summary

The past few days I have been attending a workshop by Erin Dolan of the CURES program (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience) at Santa Rosa Junior College. More than ever, courses are transitioning from the traditional lectureship structure to a hands-on interactive research approach. We came into the workshop with a course already in mind, and used …

QIIME 2 workshop Nov 4-5 (just prior to SSSA meeting) in Phoenix, AZ

Members of the QIIME development group, led by Greg Caporaso and Antonio Gonzalez, will teach a two-day workshop on bioinformatics tools for microbial ecology. The workshop will include lectures covering basic QIIME usage and theory, and hands-on work with QIIME to perform microbiome analysis from raw sequence data through publication-quality statistics and visualizations. The workshop …

New papers on Microbiology of the Built Environment, August 14, 2016

Microbes on shoes Review: Shoe soles as a potential vector for pathogen transmission: A systematic review – Tasnuva Rashid – Journal of Applied Microbiology (OA) Shoe soles are possible vectors for infectious diseases. Although studies have been performed to assess the prevalence of infectious pathogens on shoe soles and decontamination techniques, no systematic review has …

Green space influences human health and airborne microbial communities

A recent open access paper from the BioBE Center at University of Oregon explored the differences between airborne bacteria collected in parks and parking lots. Entitled “Urban greenness influences airborne bacterial community composition” and published in Science of the Total Environment, this interdisciplinary study combined research methods from microbiology and landscape architecture to answer the …

Today & tomorrow – live webcast – Standards for Microbiome Measurements @NIST

Definitely worth checking this out. NIST is running a meeting on Standards for Microbiome Measurements From the site: This workshop will seek input on defining reference materials, reference data and reference methods for human microbiome community measurements. This workshop is sponsored by NIST and NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Human Microbiome …

A Musing on Microbial Community Disruptions

In light of the Cold Fire that started yesterday evening in the central valley of California, I started to wonder,  ‘what happens to microbes?!’ I found myself in a literature click hole of fantastic papers that studied how fire impacted soil microbial communities in several different ecosystems. What surprised me most is how fast researchers …

Student theses on microbiology of the built environment of interest

I have some automated Google Scholar searches for MoBE related topics and recently a few theses came up in the searches and I thought I would post about them here Here is one: Indoor biological exposures : what can HVAC filter dust tell us? Author: Jennings, Wiley Charles from Kerry Kinney’s lab. Abstract: Because people in the US …

Registration for 3rd Mtg of Microbiomes of the Built Environment Now Open!

Got this by email: Registration to attend the third meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application is now open! This meeting will be held at the National Academies’ Beckman Center Auditorium at the University of Irvine, California on October 17-18, 2016. …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, July 31, 2016

Microbes in the air High throughput genomic sequencing of bioaerosols in broiler chicken production facilities – Kate M. O’Brien – Microbial Biotechnology (OA) Chronic inhalation exposure to agricultural dust promotes the development of chronic respiratory diseases among poultry workers. Poultry dust is composed of dander, chicken feed, litter bedding and microbes. However, the microbial composition …