Posting Materials from Biodiversity and the Tree of Life Course at UC Davis in 2014. I co-taught this course with Peter Wainwright and Susan Keen and I taught the phylogenetics and microbial diversity parts. Below are some of the materials from the course. Lecture 1. Introduction and Overview BIS2C. Biodiversity and the Tree of …
Your weekly update with new papers on the microbiology of the built environment, and the effect of humans on microbial communities in a broader sense. Microbes in the house Microbial analyses of airborne dust collected from dormitory rooms predict the sex of occupants – Julia C Luongo – Indoor Air ($38 for PDF, $6 to …
Anyone considering the possibility of welcoming a new furry friend into their home must first come to terms with an unfortunate fact: animals are dirty, like us most of them have lots of hair and are messy. And for a place like the Berkeley Animal Shelter, which sees well over a thousand animals each year, “poop …
Your weekend update: Microbes and drinking water Diversity of ribosomal 16S DNA- and RNA-based bacterial community in an office building drinking water system – Jenni Inkinen – Journal of Applied Microbiology (See also their 2014 Water Research paper about same system) Next-generation sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA genes (rDNA) and ribosomal RNA (rRNA) was used to characterize …
Forensic microbiology A cloud of distinction – Julian Smith – New Scientist ($1.99) Could the trails of microbes we leave behind be used to solve crimes? Julian Smith picks up the scent. (…) Like our hapless suspect, we all leave traces of our microbes behind. We are haloed by an invisible nebula of bacteria, fungi and viruses. …
Hello Microbe.net readers, I am Fangqiong. I recently received the Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoc Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I will be studying a kind of built environment microbiome, the microbiome in the urban water cycle, in Professor Eric Alm’s lab at MIT. I am very grateful to the Sloan Foundation …
There are a few news articles that have been coming out (like this one) that draw attention to this recently published paper in ISME Journal, entitled “Iron availability shapes the evolution of bacteriocin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.” The big picture of the paper was to study how resistance evolves and to explore the effectiveness of …
This paper by John Chase and crew posted recently on PeerJ takes a deep look at the office microbiome composition and concludes that the biggest factors affecting differences in swabbed samples are the geography of the office and where the sample was taken inside it. Their experiment showed minimal impact from other factors that are …
New papers about microbes in houses, food, and waste or polluted sites. Microbes in the house Environmental Contamination in Households of Patients with Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection – Megan K. Shaughnessy – Applied and Environmental Microbiology ($$) Households of R-CDI subjects in the peri-FMT period, and of geographically and age-matched controls, were analyzed for …
Set in stone Commentary: Making microbiology of the built environment relevant to design – G. Z. Brown, Jeff Kline, Gwynne Mhuireach, Dale Northcutt and Jason Stenson – Microbiome (OA) Architects are enthusiastic about “bioinformed design” as occupant well-being is a primary measure of architectural success. However, architects are also under mounting pressure to create more sustainable …