Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community in the Online Sphere

The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …

AAAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium videos available on-line

Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …

Microbes and the design of animal shelters

Animal shelters provide an essential and beneficial social service, caring for an estimated 9 million pets each year in the United States. Many animals entering a shelter are highly stressed and lack the benefits of standard veterinary care, including vaccinations. Moreover animal shelters are an intensive housing situation that amplifies the transmission of infectious diseases …

“DNA-based methods for bioaerosol analysis” – great resource!

Jordan Peccia has posted the slides from his tutorial, Molecular methods for bioaerosol analysis on Slideshare. If you would like to get a quick overview of molecular-biology based methods, this is a painless, accessible way to do it. You are encouraged to post your comments and questions after you review the slideshow. We hope to …

Lessons learned: The microbes all around us and our buildings — and Jessica Green’s Nautilus article

Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …

Habitat on Humanity

When the average person hears the terms “microbiology” and “genetics,” often mental images involving lab coats, complicated chemical reactions, forensic TV shows, and futuristic advancements come to mind. However, just this week, a team of scientists at the University of York published a paper in “Nature Genetics” (Christina Warinner et al, Pathogens and host immunity in …

Not-So-Clean Rooms

In researching previous studies conducted on microbes in space for Project MERCURRI, I ran across an interesting microbiology diversity study done on European Spacecraft-Associated (ESA) clean rooms in the Herschel Space Observatory. Historically, clean rooms are supposedly “sterile” environments that are used for the building and maintenance of spacecrafts, as directed by the UN’s Outer Space planetary …

Keith Redway’s lectures added to microbe.net web resources

We’ve just added a new link on our resources page — a whole lot of lectures by Keith Redway of the University of Westminister. The list includes the following: Recombinant DNA Technology & GM (3BIO7M4, 3BIO7X1) Laboratory Management & Safety (3GAM405) Medical Microbiology (3MED666) History of Microbiology Medically important bacteria Transfer of antibiotic resistance – …

Art and microbiology meet again but not in the way you might have expected

Well, I have always told people that we need more mixing of art and science.  In recent years we have seen lots of attempts to do some sort of art inspired by – or even incorporating – microbes.  But this is perhaps the other side of the coin.  Art is significantly influenced by microbes in …

Media, Social Media and Open Science – a summary of #IDWeek session

Just thought I would write up a quick post on a session at the Infectious Disease Week meeting in San Francisco that I was part of.  The session was entitled “Media, Social Media, and Open Access: Communicating the Science of Infectious Disease” and it featured three talks: Tara Smith, PhD: Using Social Media to Affect Change …