making the unseen microbes around you seen

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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. Greg-Plate-Broll-3 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?).IMG_2029  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.

we love science but we love other things too

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by Nicole Gerardo

This week, we did not have the traditional lab meeting. Rather than discussing a paper or critiquing a practice talk, we instead each talked about or demonstrated something that we enjoyed doing outside of the lab. These included singing, going to the movies, photography, baking, knitting and reading. Oh, and taking care of two pet rats. Some are talents. Some are escapes. Some are both. What is clear is that I am fortunate to be surrounded by interesting, engaged people.

our favorite talks at evolution

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by The Lab

At our first lab meeting following the Evolution conference, we gave an overview of some of our favorite talks. These included…

  • Todd Castoe‘s talk on snake genomics. Did you know snake blood is thick with fat after a meal? There genomes reflect the evolutionary changes required for an extraordinary metabolism.
  • Jeff Leips‘ talk on finding the genetic basis of life-history traits like life span and fecundity in Drosophila. Using GWAS to identify candidate genes and RNAi to validate their influence on a trait, they showed evidence for the mutation accumulation theory of ageing.
  • Jaideep Joshi created an agent based model illustrating the evolution of altruism in a spatially explicit environment with ‘cooperators’ and ‘defectors.’ This could be a new and interesting way to teach Hamilton’s rule in the classroom.

Evolution 2014

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evo_2014_logoBy Nicole Gerardo

Nelle, Erica, Tarik and Greg and I recently attended the Society for the Study of Evolution conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nelle gave a great talk on the how host plants and symbionts impact development of Megacopta cribraria. This was based on the last chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation, which she successfully defended hours before leaving for Raleigh! Congratulations, Dr. Couret!

Tarik and Greg presented a poster on their research on squash bug symbionts.