Microbiome

Human bodies have been shown to play host to many different types of bacteria, viruses and yeast even when healthy. More and more evidence points to the non-human component of our bodies as having a profound effect on our health. When I learned about cancer, I was taught that human cancer is caused by human cells that go rogue, either due to genetics, or environment, or both. And that is still true. However recent discoveries have added additional factors to the story of cancer. Max Kozlov wrote a review that was published in Nature highlighting two... Read more

Phase Genomics is creating a database of phage and the bacteria they infect. Viruses that infect bacteria, phage are the most abundant microbes on earth. At the same time, we know very little about the bacteria that phage infect.

Unlike other forms of genome sequencing, Phase Genomics’ technology links phage genomes with their bacterial hosts and can reconstruct both bacterial and phage genomes and their interactions. This is important because the problem of antimicrobial resistance is leading researchers to investigate phage as alternatives to antibiotics. If phage will be used to treat infections, it will... Read more

The ABRF 2018 workshop on microbiome and metagenomics may not teach you to zip-line through fire, but you will learn how to generate and manage a fire hose worth of data from microbiome projects.

What is it? A workshop covering practical tools to improve your microbiome research and to facilitate microbiome services at core facilities. The full-day workshop has two components: a morning portion covering nucleic acid extractions from difficult environmental samples, and an afternoon session covering laboratory and bioinformatics approaches to 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and shotgun... Read more