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Insights, rants, shameless self promotion, etc. from the Fierer lab and its affiliates.
Insights, rants, shameless self promotion, etc. from the Fierer lab and its affiliates.
August 15th, 2018 By: Noah Fierer, Jessica Henley, and Matt Gebert They are insidious. They are difficult to eliminate. They strike fear in the hearts of microbiologists worldwide. Hard drive failures? Third reviewers? Bedbugs lurking in conference hotels? Nope. Contaminants in your high-throughput sequence data. High-throughput sequencing approaches are now routinely used to characterize
By Tobin Hammer, Jon Sanders, & Noah Fierer May 18th, 2018 Have you—like us—ever written a paper or grant proposal with a statement along the lines of “All animals host microbial symbionts that play critical roles in many aspects of host ecology, behavior, and development”? If so, this blog post is for you. We
December 20, 2017 By Noah Fierer Let’s say a microbial ecologist wants to identify which bacteria are active in a given environmental sample at a given point in time. For example, you may want to determine which bacteria are active in a desert soil after a large rainfall event. This is often done by comparing
By Angela Oliverio and Noah Fierer October 9, 2017 In a recent blog post, we focused on the advantages and disadvantages of using exact sequence variants (ESVs) versus OTUs to cluster marker gene sequences for microbial community analyses. Just to recap – let’s say we sequenced a pool of 16S rRNA genes from a bacterial