New report from NASEM: If Misused, Synthetic Biology Could Expand the Possibility of Creating New Weapons

New report on Synthetic Biology from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that may be of interest. Synthetic biology expands the possibilities for creating new weapons — including making existing bacteria and viruses more harmful — while decreasing the time required to engineer such organisms, concludes a new report by the National Academies …

Paper of interest: Predicting antibiotic resistance from full genome sequences 

This preprint seems like it may be of interest to folks: Precise prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli from full genome sequences | bioRxiv Basically, the authors showed that, using a machine learning approach, they can quite accurately predict antibiotic resistance in E. coli from whole genome data. The emergence of microbial antibiotic resistance …

Fuzzy zeros in percentile normalization method to correct for batch effects

We recently published a method to normalize data that corrects for batch effects and allows for pooling of raw data across studies. In this post, I want to discuss more about the important (but potentially confusing) aspect of our method, where we add noise to the zeros before performing the normalization. I’ve gotten a few …

Microbiome Bioinformatics Postdoctoral Scientist, Colorado State University

The Metcalf lab at Colorado State University is seeking a microbiome bioinformatics postdoctoral scientist. The scientist will analyze multi-omics data sets, including but not limited to: amplicon sequencing data, shotgun metagenomics data, and metabolomics data. Min. reqs. include: Ph.D. in bioinformatics, ecology, microbiology or similar field. Proficient in coding languages (Python preferred). Demonstrated knowledge of …

A microbial sequencing discussion course built around a paper and a blog post

So – just a quick post for now.  More details to come.  But I wanted to get a little bit about this out there. For a few years I have been teaching a mid-level course at UC Davis on “DNA sequencing based studies of microbial diversity’.  The course has evolved over the years from a …

New tool of interest: GraftM: “a tool for scalable, phylogenetically informed classification of genes within metagenomes”

This could be of use to many people: Source: GraftM: a tool for scalable, phylogenetically informed classification of genes within metagenomes | Nucleic Acids Research | Oxford Academic Large-scale metagenomic datasets enable the recovery of hundreds of population genomes from environmental samples. However, these genomes do not typically represent the full diversity of complex microbial …

An informative glimpse into the drug factory microbiome: Which bugs coexist with our drugs? The story behind the paper

The story behind: Toward the Drug Factory Microbiome: Microbial Community Variations in Antibiotic-Producing Clean Rooms (OMICS. 2018 Feb;22(2):133-144. doi: 10.1089/omi.2017.0091.) PMID: 28873001 [Preprint] It was in 2013, on my return to Cairo University after a couple of years as a visiting scientist at UCSD, that I met Amal for the first time. Amal was a fresh master’s …