Got the following job posting over e-mail that might be of interest to folks: Postdoc in extremophile community eco-evolution A postdoctoral research position in microbial eco-evolution is available in Dr. Mark Urban’s laboratory at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. The postdoc will join a NASA-funded astrobiology project to explore how immigration, rapid …
Recent papers about microbes and the built environment: Microbes in the house Fungal and Bacterial Communities in Indoor Dust Follow Different Environmental Determinants – Fabian Weikl – PLOS ONE (OA) (…) we wanted to identify key environmental determinants for the house dust microbiome from an existing collection of spatially (area of Munich, Germany) and temporally (301 days) distributed …
So – I am teaching in BIS002C – Biodiversity and the Tree of Life again at UC Davis. And I thought it might be of interest to share (and get feedback on) some of what I am teaching for this course. Quick summary – this is the third course in an Intro Bio series …
Here is another nice paper about microbes degrading human buildings. I guess I am just fascinated by that topic! No matter what we build, microbes will find a way in or on, and will start chewing on things. This paper by a group of Austrian researchers came out a couple of days ago in PLOS …
Your weekly update of the literature on microbes of the built environment sensu lato. Microbes in the house Rhinitis, Ocular, Throat and Dermal Symptoms, Headache and Tiredness among Students in Schools from Johor Bahru, Malaysia: Associations with Fungal DNA and Mycotoxins in Classroom Dust – Dan Norbäck – PLOS ONE (OA) There are few studies …
Continuing with blog posts about my class EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity. Lecture 4 was fun and a bit scary for me. You see, I finally decided to read in detail – and cover in a course in detail – papers that claim that there are not three domains of life. Sure …
Going through the list of Microbiology Blogs we have curated at microBEnet and going to try to feature one of them every day or so. And just going to do this in semi-alphabetic order. Today’s blog: BacterioFiles (which is a podcast series with a blog with details about each post, but I view podcasts as simply audio-enhanced blogs). Author: …
Last night was the Microbiology of the Built Environment session at the bi-annual Lake Arrowhead meeting. This session was organized and sponsored by microBEnet. I recorded some of the talks and will post those videos here after some editing. Here’s a summary of the speakers and the topics discussed. The first speaker was James Meadow …
Recently I wrote here about a new report on a citizen microbiology effort focusing on microbes in water heaters: More on citizen microbiology project from @Penn_State & @NASA on thermophiles in water heaters via @scicheer @Sci4Cits Well, a new paper in PLoS One (PLoS ONE: Aquarium Nitrification Revisited: Thaumarchaeota Are the Dominant Ammonia Oxidizers in Freshwater …
There is a new #openaccess article in ISME of great importance to those studying the microbiology of the built environment: The ISME Journal – The genomic standards consortium: bringing standards to life for microbial ecology. This article focuses mostly on those characterizing “marker genes” (i.e., genes of value in phylogenetic characterization of taxa) in some way. …