#MoBE17 Day 1-2 Summary

The first evening of the #MoBE17 meeting was a reception, with a fabulous keynote talk by Ed Yong mainly focused on Science Communication. Ed had a number of tips for interacting with journalists and thinking about how we present stories instead of facts. The quote of the evening was surely “you cannot replace a feeling …

microBEnet Grant Renewal 2017-2019

We are happy to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has renewed the grant supporting microBEnet for one final time, through 2019.   As the “Microbiology of the Built Environment” program comes to an end at the Sloan Foundation, we will use this time to focus on sustainability, both of the microBEnet website and the …

A Figshare Collection on Microbiology of the Built Environment

I got an email the other day about a new feature at Figshare.  It was about a new feature they have called “Collections“. But before I describe that I should probably describe Figshare.  Figshare is a repository for depositing and sharing various digital objects including not just Figures (which they name kind of implies … …

#microbenet moves reference collection from Mendeley to Zotero

One of the main goals of microBEnet has been to improve cross-talk between disciplines with the field of the microbiology of the built environment.  One way we’ve attempted to accomplish that is through a manually curated collection of all publications relevant to the field.  At the time we began, Mendeley seemed the obvious choice for …

Dairy genomes: Good example of the power of reference genomes for particular environments

Quick post here.  Just got alerted to this paper by automated searches from Pubchase: Construction of a dairy microbial genome catalog opens new perspect… – PubMed – NCBI.  This paper provides a really good example of how researchers interested in microbial ecology of a particular system (in this case, dairies and cheese) can use culturing and …

Tutorial video on making a microBEnet blog post

As people have probably noticed, we have an increasing number of guests posts here on microBEnet, which is awesome.   This is intended to be a community resource, and we’ve been actively reaching out and recruiting people to post about their work here.  To that end, I’ve just made a tutorial video that walks you through …

microbiology of the Built Environment network (#microBEnet) 10/14 roundup and newsletter

We publish a newsletter every month here at microBEnet.  And I thought it would be good to also publish to the blog the various summaries and roundups from the newsletter.  Past newsletters are archived here.  Here are some of the highlights from this latest newsletter. MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net …