Meeting Report: ASM 2013 in Denver, Day 2/3

Day 2: Started off the day with the “Microbes in Action! Dynamics of Single Cells to Communities” which included some great talks by Greg Caporaso, Sarah Cobey, Mary Lidstrom, Trina McMahon, and Jeff Gore. The afternoon was a tough call between “Microbiology’s Next Top Model: Predicting the Future with Math and Microbes” organized by Jack …

Meeting Report: ASM 2013 in Denver, Day 1

The first day at ASM was amazing.   Started off the morning by attending the “Putting ‘Omics to the Test” session which contained talks by Ed DeLong, David Stahl, Nicole Dubilier, Julia Vorholt, and Thomas Shenk.  The overall theme of this session was to look at example where ‘omics data (genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, etc.) data was …

Meeting Report on the “1st Hospital Microbiome Project Workshop”

A new meeting report is out in the SIGS journal: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 1st Hospital Microbiome Project Workshop on sampling design and building science measurements, Chicago, USA, June 7th-8th 2012. | Smith | Standards in Genomic Sciences.  The report discusses a meeting involving many interested in microbiology of the built environment …

Making the Human Health Connection: Healthy Buildings, Healthy People, Healthy Communities

The Health in Buildings Roundtable will meet Tuesday, April 23rd from 8 to 4:30 at the Natcher Center on the NIH campus in Bethesda. The line-up includes a diverse set of speakers and topics. We saw nothing in the program posted on line mentioning microbial ecology, microbiology, or microbes, but the program might be of …

First Sampling for Project MERCCURI

Last week Jenna Lang, Russell Neches, and myself headed over to the Sacramento King’s basketball arena to collect samples before the game as part of project MERCCURI (a.k.a Microbes in Spaaaaace!). Our goals were: 1)To get culture samples, of which one representative will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) for the “microbial playoffs”. 2)To …

Discussion of surface sampling methods in the built environment (video) [Updated w/ notes]

Researchers from the University of Oregon, UC Berkeley, Cornell, and Texas looking at bacterial and fungal communities in the built environment had a great video discussion on our methods for surface sampling. Watch the video on YouTube Notes on the discussion and equipment used by each group should be coming soon. Thanks again to everyone …

Troubleshooting 16S PCR from A/C filters (or other annoying substrates)

One of our goals at microBEnet is to increase communication and collaboration between people working in the disparate fields that make up the “microbiology of the built environment”.   Most of what we’ve posted about in the past relates to general information and events… but we’d also like to host more technical information that would help …