Growing microbes in space sounds cool. Collecting microbes from sporting events is also cool (“excuse me, could I see that basketball after the game?”). Having fans collect samples with a chance that some of them will fly to the space station is a great way to engage people. Put them all together and you get …
(cross-posted from our static page on the project which will be updated as we move forward) Project MERCCURI is a collaboration of microBEnet with the Science Cheerleaders, Nanoracks, NASA, and SciStarter.com. There are three components to the project: 1) Collecting microbial swab samples from the International Space Station (ISS) and examining the microbial communities therein …
One of our broad goals at BIMERC, the UC Berkeley group funded by Sloan, is to look at what microbes are found indoors and why. We first tackled this in homes and decided to survey in a university family housing complex – in essence, getting replication in the built environment while eliminating potential sources of …
I haven’t talked a lot about this here, but in addition to the microBEnet website and conference organization we have been running a couple of undergraduate research projects related to the microbiology of the built environment. The first was a project started in January where a team of undergraduates isolated organisms from the built environment …
Last year as part of microBEnet’s mandate to perform outreach associated with the microbiology of the built environment we sponsored and managed an undergraduate research project. In this we isolated organisms from the built environment and then sequenced several reference genomes. This work is currently being prepared in a series of genome announcement publications. (see …