Just heading back (on the train) from the Association of Health Care Journalists 2015 which was in Santa Clara, where I participated in a session on The Microbiome. The session participants: Jonathan Eisen, Ph.D., professor, School of Medicine and College of Biological Sciences, University of California Susan Lynch, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine, University of California, …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Harder To Breathe – Maroon 5 Asthma severity can be affected by several indoor and outdoor conditions, including dust and microbes. In a paper that came out last week in Indoor Air, researchers from Yale University applied NextGen DNA sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities in house-dust sampled from …
Counter Culture Labs is a company that stemmed from an MIT iGEM team that made synthetic cheese. Their goal is to make vegan cheese that tastes just like the real thing with the single important difference being it is not derived from a cow, but rather a lab bench. Synthetic food is starting to trend. …
“Microbiome” is such a hot term these days. And one key question many ask is “what does it mean?” A related question is – “where did the term come from?” I tried to tackle this many years ago on my blog with a post: The human microbiome – term being used in many ways – but at …
Last week, I came across a paper in PLOS ONE that looked interesting, especially in the light of the recent mBio paper that looked at sewage as a reflection of a city’s human-associated microbiome (also see this recent post on MicroBEnet). In the PLOS ONE paper “The Source of the River as a Nursery for …
Compiling some of the more interesting tools I have seen recently. Some I have plyed with but most I have just looked at the papers briefly. Microbiome | Abstract | VizBin – an application for reference-independent visualization and human-augmented binning of metagenomic data. Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism GrammR: Graphical Representation and Modeling …
Rob Knight, together with science journalist Brendan Buhler, has written a witty synopsis (entitled “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes”) about the human microbiome and how it affects human life in the form of a TED book, now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. The description from Amazon’s webpage is below: “Allergies, asthma, obesity, …
Note by Jonathan Eisen Last week I saw an interesting new paper in AEM entitled: Indoor-Air Microbiome in an Urban Subway Network: Diversity and Dynamics. I thought it was of relveance of microBEnet so I wrote to the senior author Dr. Patrick Lee from the School of Energy and Environment and the City University of Hong Kong inviting …
A short blip of the full job posting from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are inviting applications for four full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty positions, and one of the desired areas of expertise includes: (3) Microbiomes of the Natural and Built Environment. This area addresses …
Join Dr. Rob Knight for a Reddit AMA tomorrow, September 17, 10-11:30am MT. This will be a great opportunity to ask one of the foremost microbiome researchers in the world about anything and everything related to the human microbiome, the American Gut Project, the Earth Microbiome Project, and, well, anything you can think of related …