We were super excited to see the recent paper “Recovery of nearly 8,000 metagenome-assembled genomes substantially expands the tree of life“. Really, the title says it all… the authors took hundreds of published metagenomic studies (focusing on non-human environments) and assembled thousands of genomes. Awesome. But we were curious how many of these genomes came …
Microbes indoors Review: Microorganisms in Confined Habitats: Microbial Monitoring and Control of Intensive Care Units, Operating Rooms, Cleanrooms and the International Space Station – Maximilian Mora – Frontiers in Microbiology (OA) Indoor environments, where people spend most of their time, are characterized by a specific microbial community, the indoor microbiome. Most indoor environments are connected to …
Microbes in subways Bioaerosols in the Barcelona subway system – X. Triadó-Margarit – Indoor Air ($6 to rent, $38 to own) (…) We examined the microbiological composition and abundance in space and time of bioaerosols collected in the Barcelona subway system during a cold period. (…) Multitag 454 pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene was used to …
June 21 was International Swab Day for the MetaSUB project. MetaSUB stands for “Metagenomics and Metadesign of the Subways and Urban Biomes”, an initiative in which experts together with citizens will study the microbial ecosystems of public transportation systems from all over the world. From the MetaSUB website: By developing and testing standards for the …
From the perspective of biothreat detection, one of the biggest questions is “what is the background?”. If you sample the air near a farm, there’s a good bet that you’ll find anthrax (or at least a close relative indistinguishable by a 16S PCR survey). But that’s just because anthrax lives in the soil, not because …
In November, 2012, Curtis Huttenhower began work (with funding from the Sloan Foundation) to examine the transmission of human-associated microbes by public transportation surfaces. An article on “Big Data” in the current issue of Harvard Magazine includes a description of Huttenhower’s work in the lead article “Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal.” After very …