On October 7th and 8th 2014, we held a workshop at the University of California, Davis entitled Animals in the Built Environment. The aim of this workshop was to catalyze the study of the microbiology of built environments where animals live by bringing together experts in animal health, building science and microbiology to discuss why these systems are …
Note by Jonathan Eisen Last week I saw an interesting new paper in AEM entitled: Indoor-Air Microbiome in an Urban Subway Network: Diversity and Dynamics. I thought it was of relveance of microBEnet so I wrote to the senior author Dr. Patrick Lee from the School of Energy and Environment and the City University of Hong Kong inviting …
The Knight lab has been working hard testing new primers for 16S rRNA amplicon production and its time to share our progress. So far, the 16S rRNA V4 region forward primer (designated 515f) has been paired with five different reverse primers (806r, 926r, 967r, 1048r, and 1391r) to amplify ribosomal RNA from bacteria, Archaea, and …
N. b. Should it appear presumptuous, I was publicly prompted to write this. I loathe to link to the original post by Locwin, but must for my response to make sense. A recent blog post (Sept 22, 2014; accessed Sept 24, 2014) by Ben Locwin addresses in the title and first line a study in Nature (Suez …
The last full day of the Lake Arrowhead meeting was as awesome as the first two. It must have been incredible to watch microbial genomics evolve over the last 20 years that the meeting has existed… a time span that just covers the first ever bacterial genome to the 100’s or 1000’s of genomes that …
Day 1 at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting was as always full of great talks relating to a variety of topics. Officially the session topics were “Microbial Communities I: Microbiomes; Biodiversity” and “Microbial Communities II: Metagenomics/Biodiversity/Natural Products”. Rather than summarize all the talks, I thought I’d embed the Storify of tweets here (thanks to …
Think hotel rooms are gross? An elegant study led by Jack Gilbert, published Thursday in Science Reports, suggests that our resident microbes could help ease our minds on this issue, as they very quickly populate hotel rooms (and houses, more on that below) to make our hotels microbiologically identical to our homes within 24 hours. …
While recent studies of the microbiology of the built environment (MoBE) have greatly increased our understanding of microbial community structure and composition on surfaces and in air within the spaces in which we live and work, most have been driven and led primarily by microbiologists with the building science community playing a supporting role. Perhaps as …
Well, been having many discussions recently about PCR amplification happening from “negative” controls where no sample DNA was added. Such amplification is alas pretty common – due to contamination occurring in some other material added to the PCR reaction. Obviously it would be best to eliminate all DNA contamination of all reagents and all PCRs. …
When we talk about animals in the built environment, we tend to mostly think about our companion animals such as dogs and cats. Of course insects and rodents also live alongside us. And many other animals live in built environments, including farms, zoos and aquariums. I study the microbes associated with cheetahs. In captivity cheetahs …