Story Behind the Paper: Draft genomes from JPL spacecraft… assembled by undergraduates

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 …

Behind the paper: 16Stimator

In scientific manuscripts, we tell stories of our research, generally in straight-line fashion with clear motivations and results. This type of research is rare (in my experience), with stories, motivations, and applications only realized post hoc. This is the nature of science, and our recent ISMEJ publication is no different. With “16Stimator: statistical estimation of …

Swabs to Genome Workflow available as pre-print on PeerJ

Almost exactly a year ago we finally wrapped up our undergraduate project focusing on sequencing and assembling reference genomes from the built environment.  This project aimed to take undergrads through every step from starting with a swab to ending with a published genome announcement and data in NCBI. Over the course of the work, we …