Adapting Standards: Ethical Oversight of Participant-Led Health Research

Just out in today’s edition of PLoS Medicine: Adapting Standards: Ethical Oversight of Participant-Led Health Research. The article raises questions (in my mind) about the ethics related to human genome sequencing projects. We ask, what is “informed consent” when you have your genome sequence published? What about your children’s interests, your siblings’, your descendants’ and …

Session on Citizen Microbiology at ASM meeting; Denver 5/19; abstracts due 1/15

This is going to rock.  Citizen microbiology – highlighted at the American Society for Microbiology Annual Meeting in Denver in May.  The details on the session are below.  Sunday May 19 at the American Society for Microbiology General Meeting in Denver.  If you are interested in attending Register here.  If you work on some aspect of …

Guest Post: Paul Orwin from CSUSB on an undergraduate microbial genome sequencing project

A while back we posted about our microBEnet project to have undergraduates come into the lab and sequence reference genomes from the built environment.  That project now has it’s own blog, being maintained by the students themselves.   Comments about our original post led to the following guest post by Paul Orwin, who is doing something …

‘Bring us your dirt’ — Exposure Society “citizen science”

The International Society of Exposure Science, ISES, will hold its annual conference October 23-27 in Baltimore. The Society has invited all participants to bring dust samples for its Metals in Dust Samples Study. “A special ISES Metals in House Dust Study will analyze house dust samples supplied by the meeting attendees and report results at …

What microbes are lurking in your fish tank? Good candidate for some citizen microbiology I think

Recently I wrote here about a new report on a citizen microbiology effort focusing on microbes in water heaters: More on citizen microbiology project from @Penn_State & @NASA on thermophiles in water heaters via @scicheer @Sci4Cits Well, a new paper in PLoS One (PLoS ONE: Aquarium Nitrification Revisited: Thaumarchaeota Are the Dominant Ammonia Oxidizers in Freshwater …