Today is Earth Day. Every Earth Day I try to do something for, well, the Earth. Yes, there are some aspects of Earth Day that are a bit fluffy and hippyesque (in good and bad ways) but I do think it is a really important concept. Our planet is in need of more care …
Just got this announcement by email and I thought it might be of interest: Join the curation effort & enroll in our first workshop! What: Workshop to produce curated 18S rDNA reference database. When: July 19th — 25th, 2015. Where: Vancouver, Canada on the University of British Columbia campus. How much: We will cover the cost of housing, breakfast and …
Spent Sunday and part of Monday in Washington DC at meetings about microbiomes. Sunday was spent at “The Mother Ship” (aka the headquarters of the American Society for Microbiology” for a meeting on microbiomes run by the Kavli Foundation. I made a Storify of the Tweets from the meeting (mostly from myself and Jessica Green). I …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Harder To Breathe – Maroon 5 Asthma severity can be affected by several indoor and outdoor conditions, including dust and microbes. In a paper that came out last week in Indoor Air, researchers from Yale University applied NextGen DNA sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities in house-dust sampled from …
A 2015 paper from Casas et al (unfortunately no longer open access) investigated the effect of bleach on respiratory infections in young school-children. They analyzed information from Spain, the Netherlands, and Finland. Spain had the most instance of bleach use, which corresponded with a higher respiratory and related infections. On the other end of the spectrum, Finland …
There will be a session on “The Microbiome” at the AHCJ Association of Health Care Journalists annual meeting in Santa Clara, CA that may be of interest. Session Participants: Jonathan Eisen, Ph.D., professor, School of Medicine and College of Biological Sciences, University of California Susan Lynch, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, University of California, San …
There is a new paper out in Frontiers in Microbiology by fungal geneticist Joan Bennett that is fascinating: Frontiers | Silver linings: a personal memoir about Hurricane Katrina and fungal volatile. Here is how it starts: In August 2005 I was about to start a sabbatical leave during which I planned to work on the annotation …
There is an article about the NY Subway Microbiome study by Bethany Brookshire that is worth checking out: Making a microbe subway map | Student Science. It discusses how high school students helped in the subway microbiome study that came out recently (see the post by Chris Mason about this here: The long road from Data to …
by Simon A. Hernandez & Nichole A. Broderick Since its launch in summer 2013, the Small World Initiative (SWI) has expanded from a small “Microbes to Molecules” course at Yale University to a multi-institutional (60 institutions in 5 countries) organization with more than 2000 students and alumni. Professor Jo Handelsman and colleagues at Yale pioneered …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Mat Kearney – Breathe In, Breathe Out This paper came out last month, and I thought it would be nice to briefly mention it here, even though many other papers have looked at the concentrations of airborne bacteria and viruses as well. In this study, done by Aaron Prussin …