How to keep up with microbial ecology and the built environment: microBEnet is your place

Just posting a wrap up of posts on microBEnet (where I blog frequently as do many other folks that work on something related to microbial ecology, the built environment, or the intersection of the two).  microBEnet is really becoming a central place to find out what is going on in the world of microbial ecology and the built environment.  And I love that we are getting more and more posts from outsiders about their work, their meetings, their ideas and more.  Anyway - here is a wrap up of the posts for the last month.  If you are interesting in joining microBEnet and writing posts about relevant topics, let me know.

Jenna Lang (staff scientist in my lab) -- meeting reports from a Planetary Protection meeting

• Planetary Protection Workshop (Forward Contamination)
• Workshop on Planetary Protection Knowledge Gaps for Human Extraterrestrial Missions (Intro)

My posts:

• Is the MinION thumb drive sequencer taking off? Seems so …
• Interesting analysis of data sharing in paleogenetics #OpenScience
• Great “Hidden Life” (of homes and people) Learning Activity from the NY Times #microbiology
• Important read from Aaron Darling: Not so fast, FastTree
• Fascinating and distressing look at cruise ship turnaround
• Resistance (The Film) coming to UC Davis April 9
• Great #openaccess collection of papers on RNA
• Today in germophobia and antimicrobiomism: grandparents who hate microbes
• I love that @eLIFE is publishing draft papers now (brewery microbiome)
• Evolution of DNA Sequencing 2015 Version
• Methylisothiazolinone in household items – a growing (or well, killing) problem #germophobia
• Cool: James Clemens High School-Hudson Alpha Classroom Microbiome Project
• Well, I guess this means microbiome engineering has arrived (sort of)
• Today in “where’s the pathogen?” Can you find Burkholderia on 500 acres with 50 samples?
• Yes Virginia, there is a paper on microbial transfer during beer pong
• Healthy Buildings 2015 meeting promo / preview

Alexander Sczyrba on the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI)

• CAMI Challenge is Now Open for Participation

Elisabeth Bik from Stanford roundups from Microbiome Digest

• Best of MicrobiomeDigest: Fisherman’s Friends
• MicrobiomeDigest – your daily fix of microbiome literature

Greg Caporaso from Northern Arizona University on SciPy

• SciPy 2015 Computational Life and Medical Sciences Mini-Symposium: Call for Abstracts

David Coil (a staff scientist at UC Davis in my lab)

• Official release of Gut Check: The Microbiome Game “print-at-home” edition
• Nostra culpa: Revised results for the microbial playoffs in space
• Gizmodo article regarding discussing data uncertainty in microbiome studies

Bill Van Bonn (of the Shedd Aquairum)  on the Aquarium Microbiome Project

• The Built Aquatic Environment

Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech

• What sequencing core do you recommend for environmental samples with low concentrations?

Alex Alexiev - undergraduate in my lab

• Microbes Corroding Concrete
• Using Sewage to Estimate a City’s Gut Health?

Maria Nunez of Mycoteam

• Microbial sampling in building surveys: what and why are we sampling?

Amanda Makowiecki at UC Boulder

• Acquired Resistance to Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation

Rachel Adams - post doc at UC Berkeley

• Fungal amplicons

Ben Kirkup of the  Naval Research Laboratory

• Bad-omics

Embryete Hyde from UCSD

• Rob Knight’s lab moves to UCSD
• Rob Knight’s TED Talk Released!

Brent Stephens of the Illinois Institute of Technology

• Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 2

Bubba Brooks from UC Berkeley

• New paper on diseased vs healthy infants in a NICU, possible impacts for future hospital microbiome work

Kyle Bibby of the University of Pittsburg

• The Pittsburgh Water Microbiome Project