For those interested in conducting “microbiome” type studies where DNA sequencing is used to characterize and compare microbial communities this could be uf use: Conducting a Microbiome Study by Julia K. Goodrich, Sara C. Di Rienzi, Angela C. Poole, Omry Koren, William A. Walters, J. Gregory Caporaso, Rob Knight, and Ruth E. Ley. It is a good overview …
Just got this email letter from the American Society for Microbiology and I thought it would be useful and important to share. Please – everyone out there doing work involving potential harmful microbes – redouble your efforts to do that work as safely as possible. And also consider careful the risk – benefit balance for the …
Another really interesting microbial diversity paper in mBio. This one is from Josh Neufeld and colleagues: Multisubstrate Isotope Labeling and Metagenomic Analysis of Active Soil Bacterial Communities. The key thing they did is summarized in their abstract: We incubated samples from three disparate Canadian soils (tundra, temperate rainforest, and agricultural) with five native carbon (12C) or …
I have to admit I don’t know much about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) or about Coursera, but the idea does sound pretty intriguing. A new one is starting this fall called “Gut Check: Exploring your Microbiome” that sounds particularly awesome. It’s hosted by Rob Knight and others in his lab, with “visiting” lectures from …
Got pointed to this paper by automated Google Scholar searches that I have for many of the authors of the paper: Conditionally Rare Taxa Disproportionately Contribute to Temporal Changes in Microbial Diversity in mBio by Ashley Shade, Stuart E. Jones, J. Gregory Caporaso, Jo Handelsman, Rob Knight, Noah Fierer, and Jack A. Gilbert. In the paper (which is, …
Recently I participated in the Society for Building Science Educators (SBSE) annual retreat (more about this soon). And at the retreat I saw a fascinating presentation rom Richard L. Hayes who runs helps facilitate something called the Building Research Information Knowledgebase (aka BRIK). BRIK is a “collaborative effort of the American Institute of Architects and the National Institute …
The American Institute of Architects are looking for “Educational Proposals” for their 2015 Convention: See Abstract Scorecard. I just put in a simple proposal to have a 60 minute panel discussion on “Architecture and Microbiology”. But maybe someone else out there would want to put together a more comprehensive proposal on Microbiomes and Architecture and Design and, well, lots of other …
Just a quick note that the late-breaking poster deadline for the annual American Associattion for Aerosol Research (AAAR) conference is Monday, July 21st. This conference will run from October 20-24, in Orlando Florida. Here’s the description of the conference from the website: On behalf of the AAAR 33rd Annual Conference organizers, I am excited to …
Definitely worth checking out this paper from Kyle Bibby’s lab: PLOS ONE: Shift in the Microbial Ecology of a Hospital Hot Water System following the Introduction of an On-Site Monochloramine Disinfection System. A key figure in the paper is Figure 2 which I post here. The figure shows a PCA based clustering of samples based on …
Have you ever said “I boiled a jar to disinfect it”? Well, you were wrong. You should have used “I boiled a jar to sanitize it”. Disinfectants refer to chemical substances used to kill microbes. Therefore, something has been disinfected only if a chemical was used. Heating or irradiating surfaces are methods of either sterilizing (free …