FDA Announces 2014 Food Safety Challenge on detecting Salmonella in produce (w/ $500K to be awarded)

Well this is very interesting. The FDA has announced a competition: U.S. Food and Drug Administration | 2014 Food Safety Challenge. From their site Summary While the American food supply is among the safest in the world, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 1 in 6 Americans is sickened by foodborne illness …

Announcing the scikit-bio cookbook “recipe-of-the-week” series

scikit-bio is a library for building bioinformatics tools and workflows in Python. It’s already a core dependency of QIIME, is extensively used in An Introduction to Applied Bioinformatics, and was the subject of my talk at SciPy 2014 (video) this past July. One of our focuses with scikit-bio is to make its functionality very accessible …

Interesting (but closed-access) review article on “Urban microbiomes and urban ecology”

This article, “Urban microbiomes and urban ecology: How do microbes in the built environment affect human sustainability in cities?” certainly gets points for an intriguing title.  Though it is sadly closed-access. I haven’t read the whole article, but it’s basically a review of a lot of microbiology of the built environment literature, especially as it relates …

Greenbuild International Conference and Expo

Just a quick post to highlight the upcoming Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in New Orleans, Oct 22-24.  Here’s the slightly over the top pitch from the organizers: Greenbuild is the premier event for sustainable building. Featuring three exhilarating days of uplifting speakers, unmatched networking opportunities, showcases, LEED workshops and tours of green buildings in New …

Comparative Analysis of Functional Metagenomic Annotation and the Mappability of Short Reads (by Rogan Carr and Elhanan Borenstein)

We’d like to first thank Jon for the opportunity to discuss our work in this forum. We recently published a study investigating direct functional annotation of short metagenomic reads that stemmed from protocol development for our lab. Jon invited us to write a blog post on the subject, and we thought it would be a …

Report and Storify from Lake Arrowhead: Day 2

Another great day at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics meeting.   The session titles today were “Metagenomics/Pathogens/Antibiotics/Evolution” and “Antibiotic Resistance”.  As always, the best summary of the talks can be found in the Storify below.   My random notes are here… these are just the things that struck me. Thanks to Surya Saha for the …

Report and Storify from Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics: Day 1

Day 1 at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting was as always full of great talks relating to a variety of topics.  Officially the session topics were “Microbial Communities I: Microbiomes; Biodiversity” and “Microbial Communities II: Metagenomics/Biodiversity/Natural Products”. Rather than summarize all the talks, I thought I’d embed the Storify of tweets here (thanks to …