New papers on Microbiology of the Built Environment, October 1, 2016

Microbes in subways Bioaerosols in the Barcelona subway system – X. Triadó-Margarit – Indoor Air ($6 to rent, $38 to own) (…) We examined the microbiological composition and abundance in space and time of bioaerosols collected in the Barcelona subway system during a cold period. (…) Multitag 454 pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was used to …

Fungal assemblages in bathrooms… sounds interesting but not $38 interesting.

So having gained a reputation as the toilet guy (e.g. Slate, RedOrbit, microBEnet) I felt like I just had to write about this article.  Plus it sounds really cool.   This article is by Jennifer Fouquier (also cool) who is in Scott Kelly’s lab at UC San Diego San Diego State.  The title “Rapid assemblage of …

Issues classifying ITS data? The answer could be simply using “blast” during taxonomy assignment in QIIME

I wrote a post on the Seagrass Microbiome website yesterday about my struggles with fungal ITS sequencing data which I thought I’d share here as well in case anyone is looking to jump into the fungal fray. To summarize: changing the default method of the QIIME assign_taxonomy.py script from “UCLUST” to “blast” dramatically increased the …