Preliminary Program of Confirmed Speakers Lake Arrowhead International Microbial Genomics Conference September 14-18, 2014 Keynote Speaker: Julia A. Segre, National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD (skin microbiome; tracking outbreaks through genomic sequencing) Mirobial Communities I: Microbiomes Peter Turnbaugh, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (human microbiome) Noah Fierer, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (human microbiome; …
Just finished reading this review article preprint on PeerJ by Major Ben Kirkup from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Called “Counterinsurgency Doctrine Applied to Infectious Disease” this article reviews the existing literature on the human microbiome, gives some background on military counterinsurgency doctrine, and then applies insights from the latter to the former. …
Imagine you have a camera with a special “anti-macro” lens. This lens scrubs from any image all plants and animals and other “macro” organisms. And this lens also highlights the remaining living things – the microorganisms – anywhere in the frame (including those that were in or on the macro organisms removed from the image). …
The American Museum of Natural History just released a new short documentary that highlights built environment microbiology research. Actually the film is about antibiotic resistance evolution in Staphylococcus aureus, but the filmmakers also wanted to highlight the not-so-ominous interactions we have with the built environment microbiome every day. So they came out to Oregon to …
There is a new paper of interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd: Identification of Household Bacterial Community and Analysis of Species Shared with Human Microbiome. Published June 7 in Current Microbiology by a group from South Korea, it details culture-based and culture-independent (i.e., rRNA PCR) comparisons of the bacteria found on fridges and …
This meeting is an annual gathering to bring together all of the Sloan grantees, their labs, and other stakeholders in the field to discuss the status of the microbiology of the built environment program. Thanks again to Mark Hernandez and Alina Handorean for all their hard work in putting it together. Note that I will …
The first day at ASM was amazing. Started off the morning by attending the “Putting ‘Omics to the Test” session which contained talks by Ed DeLong, David Stahl, Nicole Dubilier, Julia Vorholt, and Thomas Shenk. The overall theme of this session was to look at example where ‘omics data (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, etc.) data was …
After some off-line dialogue related to my “Should you lick your baby’s dropped pacifier?” blog post, I have decided to post a separate comment regarding the hygiene hypothesis, mentioned in the introduction, and the plasticizer hypothesis, emphasized by some off-line correspondents. What is clear is that in the modern, human-occupied indoor environment, there are microbes …
A story on the May 6th NPR program, Morning Edition, “Parents’ Saliva On Pacifiers Could Ward Off Baby’s Allergies” features a focus on the human microbiome, partental behavior and babies’ allergies. “That word “microbiome” – describing the collection of bacteria that live in and on our bodies – keeps popping up. This time, researchers say …
The last of the new Sloan grants is a project called “Transmission and alteration of the human microbiome by urban public transportation systems” which is being managed by Curtis Huttenhower at the Harvard Public School of Health, along with his Co-PI, Jack Spengler. Detailed description below: