Four hundred and eleven Petri dishes, lots of lab volunteers, hundreds of community members and one new lab camera. The Gerardo lab successfully participated in the Atlanta Science Festival Expo 2016, culturing microbes with over 400 people as part of the MYcrobes project. We will take photos of the growing microbes over the next week and post them to the MYcrobes website. Watch them grow!
by Itai Doron
While there has always been an innate emphasis on researchers to engage the scientific community through publications and research proposals, a experimental method known as citizen science is leading to newfound emphasis on the scientific community’s engagement with the public. It is typically utilized by providing citizens of a certain locality with instructions for data collection. As I continue to explore graduate programs with a focus on the microbiome and microbial ecology, I have been struck by the number of faculty members involved in citizen science. Several collaborations, such as the Wildlife of Our Homes, connect labs (and their local communities) from across the country.
One of my own exposures to citizen science was with the Gerardo lab through the Atlanta Science Festival. At this event, we premiered the website mycrobes.org. Visitors of our booth were provided a plate with bacterial medium and allowed to inoculate it with a body surface or anything else in their environment. Pictures were taken daily for a week and uploaded to the website. Not only is the website still available, but certain members of the lab are working on updating the website and data collection methods for integration into the biology curricula of local Atlanta schools.
Although the importance of generating interest among science outsiders and kids in society cannot be understated, the integration of citizen science also benefits the scientific community, especially among researchers focused on certain microbial symbionts and the microbiome. Research like the projects undertaken by our lab have become possible due to our improving ability to collect and sort large volumes of data from an environment, but this sort of inquiry only results in significant findings if we can find trends in data across many individuals or across multiple environments. Insect collection, for example, could present this problem, especially if the insect of interest is associated with multiple habitats. The utilization of resident insect collectors across these habitats would save us time in the experimental process.
I certainly look forward to future involvement in citizen science during the remainder of my undergraduate career and beyond.
by Greg Fricker
We live in a microbial world, but how keenly aware are we of the presence of these microbes in our everyday life? Created with the intent of increasing this awareness, the mycrobes project has been used to illustrate the almost ubiquitous presence of fungi and bacteria in the world around us. 
Students, teachers, and interested people of all ages swab a combination of environmental and human samples onto an LB plate, and then we photograph the plates everyday allowing anyone to catch a glimpse of the diversity of the microbial life in the world around them as they track the progress of their plate online at mycrobes.org.
One of my favorite things about mycrobes.org is that you can search using tags for samples that have been collected from any source of interest (eyeball anyone?).
The mycrobes project has allowed us to reach out to the community and interact with our future scientists as we teach them about the importance of the microscopic community all around them. Lately, I have had the opportunity to speak to both local elementary school teachers from Bouie Elementary School as well as high school students in the Pre-College Program at Emory about the mycrobes project. They have been very responsive and it has been very rewarding.
mycrobes has been a wonderful lab-wide effort that would not have been possible without the hard work everyone has put into collecting samples, maintaining the back end, and photographing plates.
If you have any questions or would be interested in participating in the mycrobes project, please contact us.