This is a pre-print that just came out from several UC Davis colleagues. I actually think the title is a bit misleading because these recommendations are a lot broader than just human fecal metagenomes. Definitely worth a read! Abstract below: Background Shotgun metagenomes are often assembled prior to annotation of genes which biases the functional …
A colleague has a question they would love some feedback on regarding PCR primer selection for 16S rRNA gene amplicon surveys. I am posting it below: I am working on a project aimed to determine the influence of long-term fertilization on soil microbial communities. I am sampling both the rhizosphere and the bulk soil and …
One of the hurdles in linking microbial ecology with building science has been incorporating quantitative information about the microorganisms encountered in indoor environments, mainly because the standard high-throughput amplicon approach for community analysis is semi-quantitative, at best. Over the summer, there was a Twitter conversation related to this topic. My take-away from this (what I view …
Of potential interest: Source: FICUS JGI-NERSC-KBase – DOE Joint Genome Institute I am copying some of the announcement below: The Biological Data Science call will enable users to perform state-of-the-art computational research to explore the wealth of genomic and metagenomic data generated worldwide and translate sequence information into biological discovery. Users will have access to …
Assistant Professor Position in Soil Microbiomics with a 75% research, 25% teaching appointment. The Department of Ecosystem Science and Management seeks candidates interested in conducting research to understand the distribution, composition, diversity, and functional impact of microbial communities in soil-plant habitats. We seek individuals with diverse interests in soil microbiomes and in teaching related courses. …
My collaborator, Marina LaForgia, and I are gearing up to start processing some plant rhizosphere samples for metagenomic sequencing. We collected more samples than we can afford to process (as is life) and are starting to make the hard decisions about which samples to move forward with. This brought us to the topic of whether …
New report on Synthetic Biology from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that may be of interest. Synthetic biology expands the possibilities for creating new weapons — including making existing bacteria and viruses more harmful — while decreasing the time required to engineer such organisms, concludes a new report by the National Academies …
This preprint seems like it may be of interest to folks: Precise prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli from full genome sequences | bioRxiv Basically, the authors showed that, using a machine learning approach, they can quite accurately predict antibiotic resistance in E. coli from whole genome data. The emergence of microbial antibiotic resistance …
We recently published a method to normalize data that corrects for batch effects and allows for pooling of raw data across studies. In this post, I want to discuss more about the important (but potentially confusing) aspect of our method, where we add noise to the zeros before performing the normalization. I’ve gotten a few …
Twitter Logo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Thought this might be of interest to various folks. I made a Twitter moment regarding a discussion about microbial genome annotation methods. Microbial Genome Annotation Methods https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js