Yes, gross, but interesting: Human skin flakes lead to bad smell in air-conditioning systems 

OK so this is based on a press release so it should be taken with a grain of salt and such.  But it is interesting, and gross too, and about microbiology of the built environment. Skin squames contribute to ammonia and volatile fatty acid production from bacteria colonizing in air-cooling units with odor complaints Source: …

EDAMAME: Explorations in Data Analyses for Metagenomic Advances in Microbial Ecology (EDAMAME) Workshop

I have heard lots of good things about this course: Explorations in Data Analyses for Metagenomic Advances in Microbial Ecology (EDAMAME) Workshop EDAMAME is an intensive, hands-on course in microbial metagenome analyses, covering workflows from raw sequence analysis through to multivariate statistics and ecological interpretation. Next year’s course will be June 24-30, 2018 at the …

New Report: Environmental Chemicals, the Human Microbiome, and Health Risk: a Research Strategy

​This seems likely to be of interest to many​ – got this via email. New Report: Environmental Chemicals, the Human Microbiome, and Health Risk: a Research Strategy The human microbiome is composed of a great number of diverse microorganisms that inhabit the human body. Until recently, the role of the microbiome in maintaining human health …

Why genome completeness and contamination estimates are more complicated than you think

Genome-resolved metagenomics is the process of recovering de novo genomes belonging to individual organisms present in a community using DNA extracted from the whole community. These genomes are sometimes referred to as MAGs (metagenome-assembled genomes), and are recovered by associating assembled contigs together in “bins” in a process known as genome binning. As opposed to …

Our #ISS Microbiome Paper in PeerJ

So a number of years ago our lab embarked on Project MERCCURI (let’s not talk about the tortured acronym).  This complex and citizen science-based collaboration (website here) has been a fascinating journey.  It’s ranged from getting to watch a rocket launch in Florida, to discovering/describing a new bacterial species, to our most recent publication… the …