Just a quick post here. The AAAS Meeting on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment” that was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was on Thursday. I have made a “Storification” of the Tweets, Background and Videos from the meeting. I have embedded the Storify below. It can also be accessed directly here. We will be …
Tomorrow all day there will be a meeting at AAAS HQ on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment“. I will be speaking at the meeting, and this is one of my major research areas, so I am a bit biased, but the meeting is going to be great I think. And it will be webcast live. …
Posting a note from my [gleeful] chemistry colleagues Allen Goldstein and Pawel Misztal about the new instrument that is headed our way. BIMERC will soon receive an exceptionally unique and powerful Proton Transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS 8000) for instantaneous detection of a full range gas-phase organics including microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOC). There …
Jordan Peccia has posted the slides from his tutorial, Molecular methods for bioaerosol analysis on Slideshare. If you would like to get a quick overview of molecular-biology based methods, this is a painless, accessible way to do it. You are encouraged to post your comments and questions after you review the slideshow. We hope to …
There was a recent flash in the news about the ‘5-second rule’ when a group of microbiologists at Aston University in the UK released results from a study (that, from what I can tell, is unpublished). The summary reads, “The study…monitored the transfer of the common bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus from …
I thought this might be of interest to some of the “microbiology of the Built Environment” crowd. I gave a talk at the UC Davis Bodega Bay Marine Lab as part of the Workshop on Applied Phylogenetics on the “Evolution of DNA Sequencing”. I posted the slides to Slideshare and am embedding them here. I …
You can download the database of over 360 publications that report characteristics of the indoor environment along with the microbes found in the studies. Each publication is entered as a record and includes citation, abstract, keywords, organisms, substrates, and environmental conditions as reported by the authors. The database in MS Access format is searchable for …
One of our goals this year for microBEnet is to start to build a protocol library for members of the community. This library would hopefully include methods for carrying out all sorts of different kinds of work – from how to sample dust in a building (e.g., do you use a shop vac or a …
I have gotten many outside requests for the following information – what places (companies, Universities, government agencies, etc) provide contract services for rRNA PCR and sequencing? I know that uBiome will do this (full disclosure – I am on their SAB). The UC Davis Host-Microbe Systems Biology Core will do this (more disclosure – I am the …
A conference organized by the European Commission on the European antimicrobial resistance (AMR) five year action plan and its future challenges is taking place in Brussels today, 11 December. The conference is intended to provide a platform to discuss this action plan at the mid-stage of its implementation, looking at the issue both from a …