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 …
Microbes and the city The Metagenomics and Metadesign of the Subways and Urban Biomes (MetaSUB) International Consortium inaugural meeting report – The MetaSUB International Consortium – Microbiome (OA) Also see posts here and here. The Metagenomics and Metadesign of the Subways and Urban Biomes (MetaSUB) International Consortium is a novel, interdisciplinary initiative comprised of experts …
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 …
Get ready for a microbiome and metagenome festival in NYC! We are excited to announce the first international summit on metagenomics and metadesign of subways and urban biomes (MetaSUB), held in New York City (NYC) on June 20, 2015, at the New York Genome Center (NYGC). This will be held right after a related meeting at …
There is an article about the NY Subway Microbiome study by Bethany Brookshire that is worth checking out: Making a microbe subway map | Student Science. It discusses how high school students helped in the subway microbiome study that came out recently (see the post by Chris Mason about this here: The long road from Data to …
I. Introduction There is an oft-cited hierarchy for data, wherein ideally it should flow: Data –>Information –>Knowledge –>Wisdom (DIKW). Just because you have data, it takes some processing to get quality information, and even good information is not necessarily knowledge, and knowledge often requires context or application to become wisdom. For example, you could have …
Great article about a great study. Read them both. Failing that, here’s my short version: A study entitled “Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics” came out yesterday that is just fascinating on multiple levels. This article describes a large-scale metagenomics study carried out by the PathoMap project at Weill Cornell Medical …
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 …
Continuing their recent run of articles about microbiology (a summary of such articles can be found on Jonathan’s blog), the NYT just ran another story on the Sloan-funded microbial diversity survey of NY subways. See our previous blog on the topic here.
Nice study by Norm Pace’s group looking at microbes present in the air in New York City subway systems. They didn’t find any organisms of public health concern, and showed that the ventilation and mixing of outside air appear to work well. This work does provide an important baseline of data for evaluating the effects …