Job Posting: Postdoc in extremophile community eco-evolution (NASA-funded project)

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 …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, April 25, 2016

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 …

New papers on microbiology of the built environment, February 6, 2016

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 …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting 2012: Microbiology of the Built Environment Session

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 …

What microbes are lurking in your fish tank? Good candidate for some citizen microbiology I think

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 …

Genomic standards for microbial ecology studies (including built environment)

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. …