NIST and NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Human Microbiome Project (NIAID-HMP) August 9-10, 2016 | Gaithersburg, MD This workshop will seek input on defining reference materials, reference data and reference methods for microbiome community measurements. For more information, visit: http://www.nist.gov/mml/microbiome-standards.cfm.

The meeting page for the 21st Annual International Meeting on Microbial Genomes at Lake Arrowhead is now up.  This has been one of my favorite meetings for many many years (full disclosure — I am now a co-organizer and have been for the last few meetings).  Note — the meeting is NOT just about genomes — it includes many related topics including just about anything about sequencing (e.g. microbiome studies) and/or microbial *omics. September 18 - 22, 2016. Summary: This conference is…

Workshop in Conservation and Gene Expression.   September 19-23, 2016, Asilomar, CA Genomic variation has been a recent focus in conservation of rare and endangered species. However, the immediate response to environmental challenges will likely be determined by gene expression, which will constrain the efficacy of response and the likelihood of population persistence. Nonetheless, gene expression has been poorly studied in natural populations facing environmental and anthropogenic threats. This 5-day workshop at Asilomar, a resort on the central California coast,…

Registration to attend the third meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application is now open! This meeting will be held at the National Academies’ Beckman Center Auditorium at the University of Irvine, California on October 17-18, 2016. The meeting is free and open to the public, and will also be internationally webcast. The meeting agenda is still being developed, but will be posted on the study’s…

When:  Nov. 4, 2016 - Nov. 5, 2016 Where:  Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona   Members of the QIIME development group, led by Greg Caporaso and Antonio Gonzalez, will teach a two-day workshop on bioinformatics tools for microbial ecology. The workshop will include lectures covering basic QIIME usage and theory, and hands-on work with QIIME to perform microbiome analysis from raw sequence data through publication-quality statistics and visualizations. The workshop will also cover related bioinformatics tools including Qiita, DADA2, Emperor, scikit-bio and An Introduction to…

When most people think about microbes, they think disease. For well over 100 years the medical community’s mantra has been that “the only good bug is a dead bug.” But the functions of the human body rely not only on our own cells, but on the intricate interplay between complex communities of bacteria, archaea, viruses and microscopic eukaryotes living within us. Its overall health and wellbeing is a reflection of the interactions and balance among these many microbial mini-ecosystems and…