Just a quick post here that our paper just came out, “Draft Genome Sequences of Bacillus glennii V44-8, Bacillus saganii V47-23a, Bacillus sp. Strain V59.32b, Bacillus sp. Strain MER_TA_151, and Paenibacillus sp. Strain MER_111, Isolated from Cleanrooms Where the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover Spacecraft Were Assembled“. This describes the genomes of a couple new …
So – just a quick post for now. More details to come. But I wanted to get a little bit about this out there. For a few years I have been teaching a mid-level course at UC Davis on “DNA sequencing based studies of microbial diversity’. The course has evolved over the years from a …
I gave a talk last week for the NAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment 2017 (aka #MOBE17) meeting. I posted the slides I used to SlideShare and I am embedding them below. I spent a bunch of time thinking about what I would say at this meeting. I did not want to talk about what …
This new paper in PLOS Computational. Biology may be of interest: : The application of project-based learning in bioinformatics training by Emery LR and Morgan SL. Although many out there may already be doing projects based learning for bioinformatics, many others are not. This paper discusses how the authors added a projects component to an existing course …
Just got an email pointing me to this White Paper on Figshare …… Seems like a worthy ambition and worth a look. Some key bits: Vision The rapid pace of scientific advancement presents a continuing challenge to effective life science education. The genomics revolution brings with it a unique challenge for the biology educator, as …
As introduced a few months ago, our lab (with indispensable help again from Ashley Vater) taught a new research-based freshman seminar course. The impetus for this course was one that we ran last year, testing if Swabs to Genomes was possible in a 10-week quarter. Given the complexity and expense of the genome sequencing, we …
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 …
For the last few years our lab has been really excited about the idea of having undergraduates culture bacterial isolates and sequence their genomes. Starting with the Undergraduate Built Environment Genomes Project in 2011, we went on to re-write and upgrade the assembly pipeline that we use, followed by the publication of the “Swabs to …
The ASM Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education recently released a special themed issue focusing on Scientific Citizenship (table of contents) that was guest edited by Jack Gilbert, Karen Klyczek and Samantha Elliott. In this issue, the editors seek to address the question: How can we engage people in science? And they hope to provide a snapshot of current ideas …
There is an article about the NY Subway Microbiome study by Bethany Brookshire that is worth checking out: Making a microbe subway map | Student Science. It discusses how high school students helped in the subway microbiome study that came out recently (see the post by Chris Mason about this here: The long road from Data to …