Update

Well, good news. Another manuscript of mine has been accepted for publication in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Wooh! I just sent the galley proofs back to the editor. It really looks great. I had a very positive experience with AEM - not just because my manuscript was accepted. The peer-review was excellent - great commentary by two reviewers and by the editor as well. After acceptance, the page proofs were generated very rapidly, and I'm happy to say that the manuscript has been published. Reference:

Stefan J. Green, Ehud Inbar, Frederick C. Michel, Jr., Yitzhak Hadar, and Dror Minz. 2006. Succession of Bacterial Communities during Early Plant Development: Transition from Seed to Root and Effect of Compost Amendment. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 72:3975-3983.


Anyway, things are moving along here at NASA. We finally received all the various bits of our real-time PCR machine from Bio-Rad. Since I still have no reagents, I haven't really been able to check out if the thing is working or not. But it looks nice! Also, a third sulfate experiment has been begun and I've gathered some microbial mat samples at the initial time point (before removal of sulfate). I'm hoping to examine microbial communities at different depths during a diurnal cycle in the mat.

The summer is shaping up to be very busy. Meeting in Orlando next month (ASM) and Vienna in August (ISME). Plus, I am co-advising a student working on microbial communities associated with ophiolites. Should be interesting research. However, my position is very much in flux as my fellowship is expiring at the end of September this year. More on the state of affairs as it becomes clear.

A publication of interest: A computer program ("TreeClimber") to analyze microbial communities via analysis of phylogenetic trees. This seems similar to UniFrac, but I haven't examined it closely. However, the documentation seems better than UniFrac. Find the article here. Find the website here.

Finally, I note that NCBI has started a "Probe" database. Should be very useful.

Cheers,
Stefan