A new open access paper in Frontiers in Microbiology looked at the microbial communities found on buildings of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. I’m currently travelling, so I only have time to post the abstract here. One Hundred Years by The Cure, a song about war and destruction, seemed a good choice for this post. …
This blog post by Jennifer Glass, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, chronicles her journey from first falling in love with marine science as a college freshman, to the first original research paper out of her own lab, now openly accessible: Glass JB, Kretz CB, Ganesh S, Ranjan P, Seston SL, …
Have you heard of probiotics in cosmetics? How about a bacterial mist? A young company called Mother Dirt, with research partner AOBiome, sells a mist containing their now patented strain of Nitrosomonas bacteria (Nitrosomonas D23), an ammonia-oxidizer. The species was cultured from the skin of one of the heads (or arm? leg?) of the company. Here’s how …
Going through some old draft microBEnet posts and came across this one, “Taking Aim at Microbes on Farm Good Strategy for Food Safety | Food Safety News”. This is a nice article about microbiological control at food production facilities… but that doesn’t just focus on the (justifiably) scary antibotic resistance breeding ground angle. This article …
Nice article about the MBL Microbial Diversity course and Diane Newman, it’s new director, the in MBL Catalyst Magazine. The full PDF of the magazine is here. I have scanned in the part about the course from my copy of the Catalyst. I hope they don’t mind. The course is, in my mind, one of the …
Great to see the White House is keeping going with its commitment to citizen science and crowdsourcing activities. They will be hosting a Web Forum on the topic on September 30th. See Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, For the People, By the People | whitehouse.gov In this they write: Only a small fraction of …
A new PLoS One article from Dorado-GarcÃa et al. on the effectiveness of certain countermeasures to antimicrobial resistance shows some encouraging results. The study used MRSA levels as a positive indicator for antimicrobial resistance in Dutch veal farms. There were three methods of reducing MRSA levels in the farms that were studied: one program used protocol-driven methods, one used …
Here are the microbiology of the built environment papers that were already featured on my MicrobiomeDigest blog this week, all in one handy edition. The first paper is about dust, so Siouxsie & The Banshees – Cities In Dust would match perfectly. The ecology of microscopic life in household dust – Albert Barberán – Proceedings B …
A moderately new paper is out that is an excellent example of how biases in DNA extraction can have major impacts on inferences from culture independent DNA studies. The paper is in what I think is a generally non open access journal (Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal) for fortunately has been made open access Source: …
Continuing on my theme of scanning in notes from old seminars of interest. Here is one of definite interest to the microbial diversity crowd. These are notes from a talk by Norm Pace on February 7, 1990. My entire career was massively affected by interactions (mostly indirect) with Pace when I was an undergrad …