4. microBEnet
• Funded in 2011 in response to call from Sloan Foundation
“Establish an interdisciplinary network of researchers and
practitioners that will build the community, operate
community web resources, and organize specialized
workshops”
• Mission
Supporting, promoting, accelerating, and improving
work at the interface of microbiology and the built
environment.
13. Sloan MoBE Papers w/ >100 Cits
title cite_count journal pub_year
QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data 6216 Nature Methods 2010
Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region as a
universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi
1248 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America
2012
An improved Greengenes taxonomy with explicit ranks for ecological
and evolutionary analyses of bacteria and archaea
973 ISME Journal 2012
Predictive functional profiling of microbial communities using 16S rRNA
marker gene sequences
803 Nature Biotechnology 2013
Ironing out the wrinkles in the rare biosphere through improved OTU
clustering
642 Environmental Microbiology 2010
Quantifying microbial communities with 454 pyrosequencing: Does read
abundance count?
255 Molecular Ecology 2010
Opportunistic pathogens enriched in showerhead biofilms 219 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America
2009
Global patterns of bacterial beta-diversity in seafloor and seawater
ecosystems
189 PLoS ONE 2011
Indoor fungal composition is geographically patterned and more diverse
in temperate zones than in the tropics
163 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America
2010
Sequencing our way towards understanding global eukaryotic
biodiversity
157 Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2012
A5-miseq: An updated pipeline to assemble microbial genomes from
Illumina MiSeq data
148 Bioinformatics 2015
Longitudinal analysis of microbial interaction between humans and the
indoor environment
135 Science 2014
Human occupancy as a source of indoor airborne bacteria 129 PLoS ONE 2012
Phylogeny, identification and nomenclature of the genus Aspergillus 128 Studies in Mycology 2014
Efficient de novo assembly of single-cell bacterial genomes from short-
read data sets
125 Nature Biotechnology 2011
Architectural design influences the diversity and structure of the built
environment microbiome
125 ISME Journal 2012
Oligotyping: Differentiating between closely related microbial taxa using
16S rRNA gene data
118 Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2013
The Biological Observation Matrix (BIOM) format or: How I learned to
stop worrying and love the ome-ome
109 GigaScience 2012
House dust exposure mediates gut microbiome Lactobacillus
enrichment and airway immune defense against allergens and virus
108 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America
2014
Biodiversity and biogeography of the atmosphere 107 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences
2010
Life-threatening infectious diseases of childhood: Single-gene inborn
errors of immunity?
103 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 2010
Systems-level analysis of microbial community organization through
combinatorial labeling and spectral imaging
102 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
States of America
2011
20. Lesson 3: Diversity Matters
• Microbial diversity (taxa, genomic, functional) still
poorly characterized in most BEs
• Diversity of BEs (type, location, materials, etc) still
poorly sampled
• Diversity of approaches
• Human diversity (occupants, researchers, participants)
should be broad (gender, age, career stage, race and
ethnicity, country, field, institution)
21. Lesson 4: Communication Matters
• Social media can be a powerful tool
• Platforms for community building are still
limited
• Work with the press but don’t oversell
• Language and culture important to deal with
when crossing so many disciplines
• Open scholarship benefits and risks important
to discuss from the beginning
• Don’t be isolated (conceptually, collaboratively,
internationally)
22. Lesson 5: Identify & Fill Gaps
• Citizen Science
• Live or Dead Microbes
• AIBE
• Reference Genomes
• Space Vehicles
• Standards and Methods
• What Else?
23. Lesson 6: Education & Engagement Critical
• Public engagement via citizen science
• Research based courses and education
activities
• Edutainment is OK and even good
• Courses and course materials needed
• SciComm classes
• Integration of Wikipedia editing into
education activities