We have a little bit of press coverage here at LSU. See the post on our work at the College of Science website HERE.
Free online microbiology seminars
Jen Biddle and I are hosting a free online microbiology seminar series called All the Little Things. Follow us on twitter at @MicroSeminar and visit the webpage for a current schedule http://microseminar.wordpress.com.
-jct
Air sampling for BIOL4125
Today, with Professor Gary King’s help (who also teaches BIOL4125 but during the Fall), we did some sampling of the air in and around our classroom building, Lockett Hall. We have samples from multiple classrooms, bathrooms, hallways, and outdoors near the building. Some photos below. Students will be picking colonies next week, and later we’ll id them via 16S. Not terribly scientific, since we didn’t include appropriate controls, but it definitely scores high on nerdy coolness scales (I’ve checked them all).
The impactor sampler, into which we stuck plates with minimal medium:
The basic supplies:
One of the BIOL4125 students sampling the classroom- (glad Gary bought an impactor that was Tiger colors):
Gary King processing some samples:
-jct
Prokaryotic Diversity course this semester
Cameron will be teaching Prokaryotic Diversity (BIOL 4125) this semester. Classes are MWF 0930-1020. The course has its own twitter handle @LSUProkDiv, and all participants will be tweeting under the hashtag #BIOL4125. Each class a new microbe will be added to this hashtag from the Around the Tree exercise, which will highlight a suite of important microbial taxa. We will also be covering material across phylogenetic, lifestyle, physiological, and genomic diversity, as well as a unit on measuring diversity. Cameron is partnering with Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis on this module, which will give students an opportunity to sample and analyze microbial communities of the classroom built environment. Finally, students will be creating Wikipedia entries on taxa with no current representations. Links to those will be available from the twitter hashtag and be posted here. Stay tuned!
Update, 1/13/14: Jonathan and I have decided to remove the sampling element at this time. The course was getting a little too complex, and there will be opportunities to analyze microbial communities in other ways.
-jct
