People Behind the Science Inverview Videos: Jack Gilbert, built environment microbes and hospitals

Second in our series of “People Behind the Science” is Jack Gilbert from the University of Chicago, a new (and previous) Sloan grantee in the microbiology of the built environment program.  Here Dr. Gilbert talks about his interest in the field and his new study looking at hospitals.   Transcript below:

Summary and talks from QIIME/VAMPS Workshop, October 2013 in Boulder

(Note:  This post will be regularly updated with links to speaker slides and videos of some presentations as that information becomes available) The two-day microBEnet sponsored QIIME/VAMPS workshop just wrapped up yesterday.  The goal of this conference was to bring the developers of QIIME and VAMPS together with users from the microbiology of the built …

Talks of interest from the upcoming AAAR meeting in October (Minneapolis) – Karen Dannemiller, Denina Hospodsky

More talks of interest from the AAAR meeting coming up in a couple of months.  Previous posts about this meeting can be found here, here, and here. Phylogenetic-based Fungal Population Comparisons of Dust Collected from Water-damaged and Nonwater-Damaged Homes KAREN DANNEMILLER, Jordan Peccia, Yale University Abstract Number: 327 Working Group: The Indoor Microbiome In the 5MB.2 …

Put a microbe on it: “The Great Indoors” session at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting

“Indoors” appeared as a session title for the first time at the annual meeting of the Ecology Society of America after Brendan Bohannan of the BioBE Center at the University of Oregon and Tom Bruns of BIMERC at the University of California organized a session entitled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of …

“Hygiene is primarily about ridding the body of bacteria” — Err. No.

Part of our ongoing mission is to get people to look beyond pathogens, to consider the microbiome as a whole (indoors or human), and to not assume all microbes are evil. I was particularly struck yesterday by an article on a “water-less shower” product being hyped on SmartPlanet.  Especially this quote: “Though some of you …

Quick summary of session at #ASM2012 on “The Great Indoors”

The session at the ASM 2012 meeting on “The Great Indoors” seems to have gone well. I will be writing up a more detailed report but here is a quick summary done via “Storify”.     ———————– UPDATE February 2019 Storify is no longer in existence. Fortunately we were able to convert the Storify summary …

Coming up at the #ASM2012 mtg. “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of Built Environments”

The American Society for Microbiology meeting is starting tomorrow and there are multiple things related to microbiology of the built environment there.  These include a session that was organized by Brendan Bohannan which I am chairing.  The detail of the session are below: Session Title: The Great Indoors: Recent Advances in the Ecology of Built Environments …

Citizen Microbiology – Projects

There are a few excellent resources for locating citizen science projects, covering topics from water sampling to galaxy classification.  These include scistarter.com and citsci.org. This page contains a list of all current and recent citizen science project that have microbiology as a primary component.   Please comment with any additional suggestions! Project MERCCURI (Microbes in Spaaaace!) …

Citizen Science – Informed Consent

Any project, citizen science or otherwise, that requires participation by people requires informed consent.  In some cases, this can be relatively simple.  If you are asking people to donate a pencil for you to sample microbes the informed consent might only say that any resulting data will never be linked to that person in any …

Citizen Science – Sampling Kits

Many citizen science projects such as the Wildlife of your Home and the thermophiles lurking in your basement projects have mailed sampling kits to participants.  The kits are used, and returned to the lab for analysis.   Listed here are the contents of sampling kits from various projects to give a sense of materials they contain.   …