When your space craft cleaning reagents become food for microbes 

This is really fascinating: Source: Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft Hat tip to Elisabeth Bik for posting about this on Twitter So cool: microbes actually feed on the cleaning products. Also cool: undergraduates as authors. Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft https://t.co/ox4kMawHko — Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) June …

Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Symposium: November 2018

Received this in the mail from Katie Bowman at NAS.  Looks like a program with a lot of MoBE related material considering the sessions are “Big Data”, “Water Systems”, “The Microbiome”, “Air Quality”, and “Next Generation Buildings and Infrastructure”.  Details below are from the e-mail.   Dear Colleagues,   The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, …

A microbial sequencing discussion course built around a paper and a blog post

So – just a quick post for now.  More details to come.  But I wanted to get a little bit about this out there. For a few years I have been teaching a mid-level course at UC Davis on “DNA sequencing based studies of microbial diversity’.  The course has evolved over the years from a …

US Interagency Strategic Plan for Microbiome Research

Some important reading for those interested in microbiomes. NSF’s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country. From NSF: A group of 23 U.S. government agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), have joined to …

Special issue of mSystems: Essays by Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists

This should be of interest to many: mSystems has a whole issue dedicated to essays by “Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists”. Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists Jack A. Gilbert mSystems March/April 2018 3:e00002-18; doi:10.1128/mSystems.00002-18 http://msystems.asm.org/content/3/2/e00002-18   Conflict of Interest Declarations by Contributing Editors of the Special Issue on Early-Career Systems Microbiology Scientists, Sponsored by Janssen Human Microbiome …