This semester, I’m teaching a microbiology course for non-majors. The course was originally designed to focus on microbial diseases and public health, but as I crafted my version of the course, I wanted to broaden our view of microbiology and include the fascinating field of microbiome research. In our first few weeks (relentless winter weather …
The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has approved a grant to organize a workshop on indoor microbiome in Finland in Fall 2015. The workshop is designed for a scientific exchange including a workshop and researcher exchanges that will bridge the Sloan grantees in US and Canada with the research groups in Finland and neighboring countries. The workshop organizing committee, …
Crosspsting from my Tree of Life blog This is so cool: Tangible Interactive Microbiology for Informal Science Education. Abstract: We present an interactive platform that enables human users to interface with microbiological living cells through a touch-screen, thereby generating a tangible interactive experience with the microscopic world that is hidden to most people. Euglena gracilis, single-celled …
As people have probably noticed, we have an increasing number of guests posts here on microBEnet, which is awesome. This is intended to be a community resource, and we’ve been actively reaching out and recruiting people to post about their work here. To that end, I’ve just made a tutorial video that walks you through …
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 …
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 …
I’ve been teaching undergraduate and graduate bioinformatics for three years at Northern Arizona University. This semester I tried an experiment in my undergraduate course: I decided to ditch slides and instead use IPython Notebooks to present my course materials. This turned out to be hugely successful, and resulted in an early version of an online …
Continuing with blog posts about my class EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity. Lecture 4 was fun and a bit scary for me. You see, I finally decided to read in detail – and cover in a course in detail – papers that claim that there are not three domains of life. Sure …
Continuing with blog posts about my class EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity This is the post for Lecture 3 which was the first lecture on what I call “Era I” in DNA sequencing studies of microbes – studies of the Tree of Life. This lecture focused primarily on Woese’s work on the …
I am in the process of teaching a course on “DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity” (EVE 161 at UC Davis) and I thought it would be of use to some people to post about it. I have made a landing page for the course: EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity This …