Unifrac Update

I received an email from Micah Hamady at the University of Colorado. He informed me that there is now an online version of UniFrac available, and can be found at thefollowing website:

http://bmf.colorado.edu/unifrac/index.psp

In addition, there is a manuscript available:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/371

This should be a welcome improvement from having to install and operate Unifrac from Python.

Cheers,

Stefan

FIBR Conference and New Job

I just recently returned from a conference in Bozeman, Montanta. This conference was funded by the NSF Project - Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research, and is part of an ongoing research program at the University of Montana. This research program is involved in investigating microbial communities in hot spring environments in Yellowstone to ask the question - "Do Species Matter in Microbial Communities?"(http://landresources.montana.edu/FIBR/). The conference was excellent, and one of the most intriguing pieces of information I learned was related to the genome sequences of two relatively closely related cyanobacteria of the genus Synechococcus. Two environmental isolates of this genus, recovered from different temperatures along a thermal gradient of a Yellowstone hot springs, had their full genomes sequences. Amazingly, when these genomes were assembled and compared, they were found to have very little synteny (genes or sequences occurring in the same order on chromosomes of different species), despite having ribosomal RNA gene sequences nearly 97% identical. These genomes can be found at The Institute for Genome Research (TIGR) (http://cmr.tigr.org/tigr-scripts/CMR/CmrHomePage.cgi).

Other interesting news. I will be teaching two courses at the University of Notre Dame this fall as a visiting assistant professor in the Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences Department (CEGEOS). The two courses will be Environmental Microbiology, and a laboratory course entitled Molecular Techniques for Microbial Ecology.