Here are my notes from day 3 of the Mothur Workshop that is taught by Pat Schloss (pdschloss at gmail.com) at a hotel that is conveniently located near the Detroit airport. Of all of the bioinformatic workshops I have attended, this group of students was my favorite so far. We had a lot of fun …
Here are my notes from day 2 of the Mothur workshop taught by Pat Schloss (pdschloss at gmail.com) in December 2015. For those who are interested in learning to use Mothur for microbiome studies, Pat will be teaching another one in February. Mothur is better for bacterial characterization than eukaryotes because the sequences are aligned before OTU clustering. This …
Happy Holidays! As I already noted on my MicrobiomeDigest blog, the stream of scientific papers does not seem to take a holiday break, so I will keep on posting new papers here. Clean sweep Potential association of vacuum cleaning frequency with an altered gut microbiota in pregnant women and their 2-year-old children — Ekaterina Avershina …
Source: Relative and contextual contribution of different sources to the composition and abundance of indoor air bacteria in residences | Microbiome | Full Text Another very useful paper from the Microbiome journal. This one from Marzia Miletto and Steven Lindow. Here is the Abstract: Abstract Background The study of the microbial communities in the built …
In this recent segment on Science Friday, Ira Glass interviews Stuart Firestein about how failure in science is not just inevitable, but is just as important to the advancement of knowledge as the success is. I know that every single person can relate to this idea, which actually applies to far beyond the sciences. I …
Behind the scenes: Microbial biogeography of a university campus My name is Ashley Ross (@ashanneross) and, during my final year as an undergraduate student in the Department of Biology at the University of Waterloo, I began to wonder which microorganisms I was contacting on a daily basis while on campus. Every day on my way …
Here is a new set of papers that came out in the past week(s) that I posted at MicrobiomeDigest, but that I also wanted to share here. Three of these papers are from BMC’s Microbiome journal, which recently has published several other built environment microbiology papers, so it’s worth checking out. Microbes in buildings Moisture …
A selection of new papers of interest for this readership, collected from my blog MicrobiomeDigest: Microbes in the air Evaluation of the potential for virus dispersal during hand drying: a comparison of three methods – Patrick T. Kimmitt, Keith F. Redway – Journal of Applied Microbiology ($$) Aims: To use a MS2 bacteriophage model to compare three …
In our previous 2012 Sloan project “Microbes of the built environment spanning human urbanization” we studied environmental microbes in gradients of transculturation and of urban social stratification at the basin of the Amazon River, from hunter-gatherer villages in Peru, to the modern city of Manaus. The results showed an association between changes in home …
The Mayo Clinic in MN has built a research facility called the “Well Living Lab” which aims to help research connections between health and the built environment. Here’s a description of the facility from their website: At the Lab, we research the real-world impact of indoor environments on human health and well-being, and generate evidence-based …