There is a new report out Tuesday from the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). It is an update of a report issued on February 10, 2016. Alex Alexiev wrote about this error in a microBEnet post: CDC Error in Flooring Report. For more on the corrected report …
Just a quick post on a new paper posted last week at PeerJ. As in the previous post, this is a PeerJ Preprint, meaning it is not peer-reviewed yet. Microbial diversity of extreme habitats in human homes Amy M. Savage​, Justin Hills, Katherine Driscoll, Daniel J Fergus, Amy M Grunden, Robert R Dunn PeerJ Preprints 4:e1874v1 …
The ASM Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education recently released a special themed issue focusing on Scientific Citizenship (table of contents) that was guest edited by Jack Gilbert, Karen Klyczek and Samantha Elliott. In this issue, the editors seek to address the question: How can we engage people in science? And they hope to provide a snapshot of current ideas …
I was casually browsing Twitter yesterday when something caught my eye DNA from dead #bacteria (and extruded DNA) may inflate species counts (depending on protocol). Early DNAse step? https://t.co/YQvUJq10Df – Michael J Wise (@some_wise) March 22, 2016 This Tweet embedded one from Carl Zimmer. Here is the original: The Earth is filled with relic DNA. https://t.co/eJ0lmggmAw …
Microbes and humans Review: The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere – Mark Williams – Earth’s Future (OA) Biospheric relationships between production and consumption of biomass have been resilient to changes in the Earth system over billions of years. This relationship has increased in its complexity, …
A paper from this past year by GarcÃa-Mena et al entitled “Airborne Bacterial Diversity from the Low Atmosphere of Greater Mexico City” uses culture techniques and 16S sequencing of the air in Greater Mexico City. There doesn’t seem to be as much literature on microbes in the air as there is about other surfaces and parts of …
In this new paper in MycoKeys we present a set of automatically updated lists of the most abundant fungal species hypotheses known from sequence data, but for which little to no taxonomic information is available. If anyone can shed light on the taxonomic affiliation of these species hypotheses, we’d be all ears. Through a “built environment” switch, …
There is a new paper in AEM of interest: Characterization of biofilms developing on hospital shower hoses and implications for nosocomial infections by Maria J. Soto-Giron, Luis M. Rodriguez, Chengwei Luob, Michael Elkd, Hodon Ryu, Jill Hoelle, Jorge W. Santo Domingo and Konstantinos T. Konstantinidis They used 16S rRNA gene sequencing of cultured isolates, and metagenomic sequencing, to characterize the microbes living in hospital shower hoses. …
UPDATE from Jonathan Eisen 3/17/2017 8:30 AM. I was futzing around with the microBEnet web site and I think I may have converted this from a “DRAFT” post to a “PUBLISHED” post without the author’s permission. I am checking into this. Last week the California Academy of Sciences held a Women in Science Summit …
The Microbiology Student Group at UC Berkeley welcomes you to join us for the 17th Annual Microbiology Student Symposium (MSS) on Friday, May 6, 2016 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. This year, our keynote speakers are Victoria Orphan from Caltech and Micheal Laub from MIT. The MSS provides a forum for students researching …