My obsession with a Field Guide for Microbes

Recently I gave a talk at the AAAS Meeting in Vancouver on my dream of having “A Field Guide to the Microbes”.  The talk was part of a session on the “Earth Microbiome Project” organized by Jack Gilbert and others.

You can see a slideshow with audio of my talk below:

It seems that my talk has sparked a lot of interest as I have been interviewed by various people and publications about this concept.

For example, Holly Menninger recently interviewed me for a blog post for the “Your Wild Life” blog:
Is a Field Guide for Microbes in Our Future? Q & A with Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen.

And today a wonderfully illustrated piece came out at Wired.Com by Daniela Hernandez titled “Book of Germs: A Quest for a Field Guide to Microbes.”

If you are interested in some more background on what I have been thinking about a Field Guide to the Microbes here are some previous things I have written or said or commented on relating to this topic:

• Editorial I wrote in 2009 w/ Catrionna MacCallum for a collection of articles in PLoS Journals on the Genomics of Emerging Infectious Diseases: PLoS Biology: Genomics of Emerging Infectious Disease: A PLoS .  It has a box on a Field Guide to the Microbes. 
• Microbe Magazine Article interviewing me: Genomic Analyses Could Lead to “Field Guide to Microbes”
• Press release from project in 2005: Poison + water = hydrogen. New microbial genome shows how
• Talk I gave in November 2011 at the Compass Summit on ‘The Dark Matter of Biology.” 

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen