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

OMICS Driven Microbial Ecology ...

Quick post here.  Just discovered a nice review paper by Suenaga on targeted metagenomics: Targeted metagenomics: a high-resolution metagenomics approach for specific gene clusters in complex microbial communities - Suenaga - 2011 - Environmental Microbiology

This "Special Issue" on "OMICS Driven Microbial Ecology" has a series of papers, all of which seem to be freely available, of potential interest to readers of this blog including:

• Beyond the Venn diagram: the hunt for a core microbiome (pages 4–12)
• Omics for understanding microbial functional dynamics (pages 1–3)
• Microbial rhodopsins on leaf surfaces of terrestrial plants (pages 140–146)
• Photoautotrophic symbiont and geography are major factors affecting highly structured and diverse bacterial communities in the lichen microbiome (pages 147–161)
• Complete genome of Candidatus Chloracidobacterium thermophilum, a chlorophyll-based photoheterotroph belonging to the phylum Acidobacteria (pages 177–190)
• Metagenomic comparison of microbial communities inhabiting confined and unconfined aquifer ecosystems (pages 240–253)

and more

Oh, and a paper of mine (with Alex Worden and other members of her lab as well as multiple others)

• Phosphate transporters in marine phytoplankton and their viruses: cross-domain commonalities in viral-host gene exchanges (pages 162–176)