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 …
Compiling some of the more interesting tools I have seen recently. Some I have plyed with but most I have just looked at the papers briefly. Microbiome | Abstract | VizBin – an application for reference-independent visualization and human-augmented binning of metagenomic data. Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism GrammR: Graphical Representation and Modeling …
Almost everyone in developed countries uses cosmetics, from body washes to make-up. In the US, the cosmetics industry makes over $56 billion dollars in revenue. As a society, we use a lot of personal care products. And in order for those products to have a useful shelf-life, they contain antimicrobials – no one wants to open their …
So many new tools and methods in microbiome and microbial community studies and it is just really hard to keep up with them. Here are some that have caught my eye recently: PLOS ONE: IM-TORNADO: A Tool for Comparison of 16S Reads from Paired-End Libraries. Jeraldo P, Kalari K, Chen X, Bhavsar J, Mangalam A, …
Rob Knight, together with science journalist Brendan Buhler, has written a witty synopsis (entitled “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes”) about the human microbiome and how it affects human life in the form of a TED book, now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The description from Amazon’s webpage is below: “Allergies, asthma, obesity, …
Microbiome studies involving sports, especially non-contact sports, have yet to become a focus of basic or clinical research. Studying indoor track facilities and the athletes that use them has the potential to demonstrate human effects on the microbiome of a built environment and reciprocated effects of the built environment on the human microbiome; this using …
This article, “Urban microbiomes and urban ecology: How do microbes in the built environment affect human sustainability in cities?” certainly gets points for an intriguing title. Though it is sadly closed-access. I haven’t read the whole article, but it’s basically a review of a lot of microbiology of the built environment literature, especially as it relates …
Nice new paper that may be of interest: PLOS Pathogens: From Dandruff to Deep-Sea Vents: Malassezia-like Fungi Are Ecologically Hyper-diverse by Anthony Amend. Malassezia are commonly found in many studies of human skin and when they have been found in other places sometimes it is thought that they are vagrants having come from the skin of humans or …
When a recently published paper entitled “Microbial Sequencing Analyses Suggest the Presence of a Fecal Veneer on Indoor Climbing Wall Holds” showed up in my NCBI digest, I got excited. However, my excitement died a little when I actually read the paper. Most importantly, the title is slightly deceptive, as only 9% of all reads …
Earlier this week I saw a fascinating talk by Rachel Dutton on the microbial communities in cheese rinds. Rachel is currently a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University and for the last few years she has been studying microbial communities in cheese rinds. She was at UC Davis on Monday to give a talk and it …