In the past, we have lamented the poor representation of microbes in natural history museums. And so I must mention that there’s a wonderful microbiome exhibit currently on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Secret World Inside You, is a microbe related exhibit co-curated by Susan Perkins and Rob DeSalle, curators at the AMNH. The exhibition …
One afternoon while making my way through another DNA extraction, I was eavesdropping over the lab benches, per usual, trying to keep my mind occupied. I overheard my project manager and another undergraduate discussing an unusual project. “Do you want to contact the Sacramento authorities to get clearance to swab the light rail, because talking …
There is a wonderfully essay by Tal Abbady coming out in tomorrow’s New York Times (and available online now). A few years in Spain, and my mother’s last days, helped me see the futility of a sterilized life. Source: Less Disinfectant, More Rioja The essay is about many things, including differences between cultures (pun intended …
A paper from this past year by GarcÃa-Mena et al entitled “Airborne Bacterial Diversity from the Low Atmosphere of Greater Mexico City” uses culture techniques and 16S sequencing of the air in Greater Mexico City. There doesn’t seem to be as much literature on microbes in the air as there is about other surfaces and parts of …
Blog post prepared jointly by Andrew Doxey (@acdoxey) and Josh Neufeld (@joshdneufeld) The “aquariome” Back in 2013, as part of a project assessing aquarium microbial communities and their role in nutrient cycling, Laura Sauder (graduate student in the Neufeld lab) sequenced a shotgun metagenomic library from a freshwater aquarium biofilter that was installed on this …
A recent news article covers a new company called Cambrian Innovation and their product, a microbial mix that turns brewery waste into clean water and energy. Two California breweries are currently using the product. Energy is produced by burning the methane produced by the microbes as they metabolize waste from the beer brewing process. The water …
So many cool things in this post by Scott Chimileski at Small Things Considered: by Scott Chimileski | Have you ever visited a natural history museum and looked for microbe exhibits? If you have, I’d bet you didn’t find any. In my own searches, I usually see microbes represented only by some species names written …
by Simon A. Hernandez & Nichole A. Broderick Since its launch in summer 2013, the Small World Initiative (SWI) has expanded from a small “Microbes to Molecules” course at Yale University to a multi-institutional (60 institutions in 5 countries) organization with more than 2000 students and alumni. Professor Jo Handelsman and colleagues at Yale pioneered …
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water” -Loren Eiseley- Aquatic ecosystems can be placed into two discrete categories, native and managed. Native aquatic ecosystems may be influenced by human activities, in fact we’d be hard-pressed to find one that isn’t, but there is no intention to the influence. Managed aquatic …
By Amanda Makowiecki Miller Research Group University of Colorado, Boulder With drug resistant bacteria becoming a growing problem, alternative methods are being pursued to decontaminate air and surfaces; ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) is one of these methods. UVGI uses short wavelength light in order to disrupt the genetic material of microorganisms, this disruption either kills …