December Mothur Workshop, part 2

Here are my notes from day 2 of the Mothur workshop taught by Pat Schloss (pdschloss at gmail.com) in December 2015. For those who are interested in learning to use Mothur for microbiome studies, Pat will be teaching another one in February. Mothur is better for bacterial characterization than eukaryotes because the sequences are aligned before OTU clustering. This …

December Mothur Workshop, part 1

Pat Schloss (pdschloss at gmail.com) offers excellent workshops on the Mothur software for analyzing 16S rRNA data for bacteria. He’s just announced the next one (February 8 to 10, 2016 near the Detroit airport). I had the pleasure of attending the December workshop. A diverse and international group attended the workshop, with many folks who are interested in the human microbiome. …

Shifting Focus to the Good Bacteria in Water

Often on this blog, we talk about biofilms in water systems or water-borne pathogens. Even when we discuss the drinking water microbiome, it is seldom with a focus on any particularly beneficial bacteria. Although there has been some discussion about what essentially amounts to probiotics for water, there seems to be little literature in the area …

New Standards for Antibiotic Stewardship

The Joint Commission recently released new standards for antibiotic stewardship for field review. They aim to get more hospitals and institutions thinking about antibiotic stewardship programs and how their prescribing habits affect antibiotic resistance. Although it seems there may be opposition by some clinicians (as there always is with any change), hopefully antibiotic stewardship standards will become …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, December 24, 2015

Happy Holidays!  As I already noted on my MicrobiomeDigest blog, the stream of scientific papers does not seem to take a holiday break, so I will keep on posting new papers here. Clean sweep Potential association of vacuum cleaning frequency with an altered gut microbiota in pregnant women and their 2-year-old children — Ekaterina Avershina …

Nice microbiology of the built environment paper: Sources of indoor air bacteria in residences

Source: Relative and contextual contribution of different sources to the composition and abundance of indoor air bacteria in residences | Microbiome | Full Text Another very useful paper from the Microbiome journal.  This one from Marzia Miletto and Steven Lindow.  Here is the Abstract: Abstract Background The study of the microbial communities in the built …

A must read on indoor microbiology: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment 

2013-5-19MBPF Source: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment | Microbiome | Full Text Really nice new review paper by Aaron Prissin and Linsey Marr. It covers research on sources of airborne microbes including Humans Pets Plants Plumbing HVACs Water damage Dust Outdoor air Really thorough with tons of references and discussion of the …