By Angela Oliverio July 6, 2016 I’m in my fourth week here in the Taupo Volcanic Zone of New Zealand on my quest to understand what eukaryotic life –especially protists– can thrive in hotsprings. A quick refresher: protists are single-celled microbial eukaryotes and include many diverse lineages like amoebae, ciliates and flagellates. While bacteria and
By Jon Leff June 14, 2016 The problem There – I did it. I made it through processing my raw amplicon (marker gene, 16S rRNA, 18S rRNA, or fungal ITS, etc.) DNA sequences. Now I have a table that tells me how many of each taxon (i.e. phylotype, OTU, etc.) are represented in each sample.
By: Noah Fierer January 29, 2016 As the NFL season draws to a close, we can look back and try to figure out why some teams were winners (Go Broncos!) while others are perennial losers (sorry Cleveland). Undoubtedly one key to success is the ability of coaches and managers to select good players. Fortunately, for
By: Noah Fierer October 29, 2015 Recently there was a call from a group of esteemed microbiologists and microbial ecologists for a ‘Unified Microbiome Intiative’. I won’t go into the details as you can read the articles here and here. I agree with most of what the authors are proposing. However, there are a few
The most up-to-date lab group photo! Farewell to our former student/lab tech extraordinaire, Xavier. Welcome to our new grad students, Angela and Hannah!
By: Noah Fierer Microbial ecology has surprisingly few unifying concepts. It is difficult to identify ‘rules’ or paradigms that apply across the field of microbial ecology regardless of the taxonomic group or environment in question. Here is my short list and I realize I am probably missing quite a few obvious ones: Bacterial cell size
By: Noah Fierer In early June, I’ll be attending the biennial meeting of the Soil Ecology Society in Colorado Springs. Despite being the home of Focus on the Family and one of the more conservative cities in the U.S. (the yin to Boulder’s yang) – it is a scenic place. More importantly the Soil Ecology Society
By: Noah Fierer I write a lot of proposals – or at least it feels like I write a lot of proposals. As soon as one proposal is out the door, there is another one to write – a neverending cycle of panhandling. This is true for most scientists – we spend huge amounts of
#A poem for any biologist who has ventured into the world of scripting. By: Anne A. Madden >>>file = open(“Expected_Errors.txt”, ‘r’) >>>print May I be so BOLD as to take a minute and discuss my current plight? In my new job as a bioinformaticist, I can’t seem to get any code right. Though I search for PERLs
Adventures in exploring the great indoors By Anne A. Madden Some little girls dream of one day having a baby, or at least getting a puppy, and naming it. When I was young, I dreamed of naming things too, but I envisioned these things as new elements, planets, and species rather than swaddled children. I