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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.
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
By Noah Fierer, Tess Brewer, & Mallory Choudoir May 2, 2017 Typically, when we analyze 16S rRNA gene data for bacterial and archaeal community analyses we start by clustering sequences into operational taxonomic units (OTUs), i.e. clustering sequences that fall into fixed similarity thresholds (with OTUs often, but not always, defined at the ≥97% sequence