Guest Post by David Thaler: Thoughts on the Inaugural Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment

(This is a guest post by David Thaler, who is one of the Sloan-funded investigators working on the microbiology of the built environment.  The goal is to spark substantive discussion, so please comment below!) A few thoughts after the Inaugural meeting of Microbiology of the Built Environment Boulder My own opinions on these points are …

GSC13: From Genomes to Interactions to Communities to Models

The Genomic Standards Consortium recently held its 13th Workshop from March 5-7 in Shenzhen, China, where advances in genomics research were discussed in close proximity to the massive sequencing power of BGI. As a workshop participant, I found the meeting presentations to be both informative and exciting; the data spoke for itself, and many projects …

Slides from #IndoorAir2011 w/ audio

I updated my slides from my talk at Indoor Air 2011 with audio. Here they are: Eisen.indoor air2011 http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=eisen-indoorair2011-110613124957-phpapp02&stripped_title=eisenindoor-air2011&userName=phylogenomics View more webinars from Jonathan Eisen We are working on getting some other presentations up here but are dealing with some sharing/copyright issues first.

Opening up one’s eyes to other fields

I spend most of my time working on biology.  I like to think I cover lots of breadth within biology and I probably do – microbes, evolution, ecology, human health, pathogens, symbioses, forensics, genomics, bioinformatics, and more.  But nothing like really looking at other fields to realize how narrowly focused one is. And that is …

Reports (2) from Indoor Air sessions on microbiology of the built environment

Things that jumped out at me from the afternoon session today.  For the morning session see here. Norm Pace (CU Boulder) made the point during questions that when we talk about “pathogens” in metagenomic environmental sequences, what we really mean is “sequences related to pathogens” and that probably most of those sequences don’t come from …

Indoor Air 2011 coming up in Austin, TX – still time to sign up #microbes …

Just got sent a link to this interview of Rich Corsi on a Fox TV station about the Upcoming Indoor Air 2011 meeting: UT: Indoor Air Conference. There is still time to sign up for the meeting.  I note – there will be sessions Wednesday and Thursday focusing on microbiology of the built environment.  We (i.e., …

A conference abstract that leaves me wanting more: microbes in the indoor air of high speed trains

Found a meeting abstract that intrigued me:Distribution of Airborne Bacteria and Fungi in the Korean High Speed Train Indoor.  The abstract is below: Background/Aims: It is known that the airborne bacteria and fungi can be the cause of a variety of infectious diseases as well as allergic and toxic effects. The purpose of this study …