Announcement: Sloan Microbiology of the Built Environment Data Analysis Workshop (secrets of QIIME, VAMPS and QIITA) January 6-7, 2015 Application Deadline — October 30, 2014 Progress on the microbiology of the built environment, especially through amplicon studies, has been extremely rapid. However, analyzing and combining datasets has been increasingly challenging, especially as investigators use …
Oh my. This story is littlered with so much over the top germophobia I do not know where to begin: The Dirt on Your Sponge – NYTimes.com. The story, by Penelope Green, discusses how Tod Maitland and Matthew Flannery have developed a sponge cleaning system called “SpongeBath”. This is going on sale on Amazon and Bed Bath and …
Nice new paper that may be of interest: PLOS Pathogens: From Dandruff to Deep-Sea Vents: Malassezia-like Fungi Are Ecologically Hyper-diverse by Anthony Amend. Malassezia are commonly found in many studies of human skin and when they have been found in other places sometimes it is thought that they are vagrants having come from the skin of humans or …
Note – Jonathan Eisen invited Jack Gilbert to write a post about the Earth Microbiome Project especially in light of the recent paper on the topic by Gilbert et al. (see Eisen’s blog post about this paper here). Post by Jack Gilbert submitted by email to Jonathan Eisen. The Earth Microbiome Project started as …
For anyone looking for another reason to fear hospitals, nosocomial infections (hospital acquired infections), or spinal injections, here is a story for you. Contaminated spinal injections were given to patients in 20 states and led to 751 individuals developing fungal meningitis and 64 deaths. FDA and CDC officials conducted a preliminary investigation and discovered a …
If you have any interest in large scale microbial ecology – either to do it yourself or to make use of the results or to just watch it as it happens, you should read this paper: BMC Biology | Full text | The Earth Microbiome project: successes and aspirations. It outlines the history and goals and …
There was a very interesting artilce in the New York Times on August 21 bu Michael Kimmelman: In Redesigned Room, Hospital Patients May Feel Better Already. The article focuses on a move by the University Medical Center of Princeton to redesign hospital rooms. And Kimmelman discusses a variety of issues associated with hospital design. And there were …
Just a quick post here. Got alerted to this paper by Google Scholar updates: A Combined Approach to Assess the Microbial Contamination of the Archimedes Palimpsest. And I was drawn into it immediately by the first line in the introduction The transmission of ancient texts through the ages appears to be an almost miraculous event …
You can check out David Coil’s introduction to the project here. The workflow pre-print is hosted by Peer J here. Feel free to check it out! We would love any comments or suggestions. I was first introduced to the swabs to genome workflow project a little over a year ago. I had just started in the …
When a recently published paper entitled “Microbial Sequencing Analyses Suggest the Presence of a Fecal Veneer on Indoor Climbing Wall Holds” showed up in my NCBI digest, I got excited. However, my excitement died a little when I actually read the paper. Most importantly, the title is slightly deceptive, as only 9% of all reads …
