(This is a blog post by Cinta Gomez-Silvan, the first author on this paper) Story behind the paper: A comparison of methods used to unveil the genetic and metabolic pool in the built environment. It seems pretty obvious that in the field of microbial ecology we need to understand how living microorganism interact. Nevertheless, …
A few years ago I was hearing increasing discussion about the idea that much of the microbiology of the built environment was “stamp collecting” and that the indoor microbiome might consist largely of dead or non-viable material passively deposited indoors. Many pweople argued that there was a need for better tools (or increased use of …
Received an e-mail today from Cameron Turner (@enviroDNA) with information about an upcoming workshop “Understanding the Ecology of Environmental DNA from Diverse Disciplines” to be held at the annual ESA meeting, this year in Fort Lauderdale, FL, August 7-12th. Some information from the e-mail below, also attached is the workshop flier. The workshop is titled …
From May 13-14 2015 we hosted a “Live/Dead Workshop” here at UC Davis where we basically discussed a number of issues related to the topic of figuring out which bacteria are alive/viable in a given microbial community. This is particularly important in the built environment where we suspect that many (most?) microbes are dead and …
When we take a swab and perform 16S sequencing we assume that this gives us a picture of who is present in a bacterial community. But actually what we’re measuring is what DNA is present on that surface. This technique doesn’t tell us who is alive, who is dead, who is viable, who is non-viable, …