(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) The last seven weeks of laboratory and computer work have been a mixture of successes and failures that eventually brought us to Week 8. The goal of this week was to build phylogenetic …
Microbes in the city Microbial Community Patterns Associated with Automated Teller Machine Keypads in New York City – Holly M. Bik – mSphere (OA). News coverage at EurekAlert, ScienceDaily, and NYMagazine. (…) Here we carried out a baseline study of automated teller machine (ATM) keypads in New York City (NYC). Our goal was to describe …
You know sometimes you use a working title for something for long enough that it becomes the title? Like “Snakes on a Plane”. That’s what happened in this case, we also meant to come up with a name for this class… never did and so the official name at the registrar is “Koala Poop”. Awesome. …
(This blog post was prepared by students enrolled in the Koala Poop Microbiome Class in the Fall of 2016 at UC Davis) Koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) are currently threatened by a highly infectious disease known as Chlamydia pecorum. In response to the growing prevalence of this disease in koala populations, researchers are treating affected koala bears …
Waste released from pharmaceutical plants in India and China is contributing to the spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. So this is certainly interesting. There is an opinion piece in STAT by Henry Waxman and Bill Corr from Waxman Strategies: Waste from pharmaceutical plants promotes antibiotic-resistant superbugs. It is of interest both because we are almost certainly in …
Microbes indoors Review: Microorganisms in Confined Habitats: Microbial Monitoring and Control of Intensive Care Units, Operating Rooms, Cleanrooms and the International Space Station – Maximilian Mora – Frontiers in Microbiology (OA) Indoor environments, where people spend most of their time, are characterized by a specific microbial community, the indoor microbiome. Most indoor environments are connected to …
Microbes in subways Bioaerosols in the Barcelona subway system – X. Triadó-Margarit – Indoor Air ($6 to rent, $38 to own) (…) We examined the microbiological composition and abundance in space and time of bioaerosols collected in the Barcelona subway system during a cold period. (…) Multitag 454 pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was used to …
First up today was Rachel Dutton talking about “Horizontal gene transfer in Cheese”. She began by talking about cheese as a great model system for understanding the principles behind microbial community formation. Many replicates, controlled conditions, manipulable etc. After doing initial 16S/ITS survey they cultured representatives of all the dominant genera in the cheeses and …
Every two years a bunch of microbial ecology and microbial genomics folks descend upon the UCLA Lake Arrowhead center for a fabulous conference. See this search result for numerous posts here at microBEnet about the meetings past. This year (as in 2012) there is a session on the Microbiology of the Built Environment. But that’s …
Jumping on the blame train, my colleagues and I have found yet another reason to avoid antibacterial products. Our study, which identified a correlation between certain antibiotic resistance genes and the much maligned triclosan in indoor dust, was published in Environmental Science & Technology last week. As of today, the full text version is freely …