So last Spring quarter Ashley Vater and myself ran a class where we went from abalone feces swabs on the first day, to a draft of a Genome Announcement on the last day… written by the students. With 16 students in the class we ended up with 10 sequenced/assembled/annotated genomes. A full description and summary …
microBEnet sponsored a “Microbiology of the Built Environment” session at the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting earlier today. The schedule for the session is below Rachel Dutton University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA “Genetics and Genomics of the Simple Microbial Communities from Cheese” Elizabeth Hénaff Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY “The Microbiome …
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 …
Esther Singer opened the day talking about “Metagenomics to Reveal Correlations between Switchgrass Ecotypes and their Microbial Communities”. She told a nice story about the ecotype-specificity of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere microbial communities. I was surprised that for some bacteria this was evident even at the phylum level… so big differences. Daria Van Tyne “Changes …
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 …
So 18 months after we released the free, print-at-home version of Gut Check: The Microbiome game we finally have a commercial version! The game is available from MOBIO Laboratories here, for the very reasonable price of $20 with free shipping. For a really nice write-up about the game, check out this blog post from Anne …
Studying the 5 second rule, antibiotic resistance genes in indoor dust and sewers, Legionella in the air, and water treatment. Microbes on the floor Longer Contact Times Increase Cross-Contamination of Enterobacter aerogenes from Surfaces to Food — Robyn C. Miranda — Applied and Environmental Microbiology ($25 for 1 day) Bacterial cross-contamination from surfaces to food can …
Microbes found in ambulances Not surprisingly, bacteria could be detected after swabbing surfaces in ambulances. Detection and characterization of surface microbial contamination in emergency ambulances – Aketza Varona-Barquin – American Journal of Infection Control ($35.95) A cross-sectional study was performed in 10 emergency basic life support ambulances operating in Bilbao, Spain, to assess surface bacterial …
Microbes indoors Effects of Microbial Aerosol in Poultry House on Meat Ducks’ Immune Function – Guanliu Yu – Frontiers in Microbiology (OA) The aim of this study was to evaluate effects of microbial aerosols on immune function of ducks and shed light on the establishment of microbial aerosol concentration standards for poultry. A total of 1800 …
Microbes of old Early evidence for travel with infectious diseases along the Silk Road: Intestinal parasites from 2000 year-old personal hygiene sticks in a latrine at Xuanquanzhi Relay Station in China — Hui-Yuan Yeh — Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports ($31.50) The Silk Road has often been blamed for the spread of infectious diseases in …