Eisen Lab Blog

Citizen (Funded) Science

As evidenced by the buzz around the Citizen Science session at ASM yesterday, microbial ecologists are increasingly looking for ways to engage “Citizen Scientists” to participate in large-scale projects, often by crowd-sourcing sample collection. This concept is not new; in fact, citizen scientists have been counting birds every year for over 100 years!

A recent price drop in high-throughput sequencing technology has enabled the ginormous scale of current citizen science projects. Anyone who is interested can participate by swabbing their homes or their poop! This same price drop also enables a different sort of citizen scientist. This sort of citizen scientist is not tied to any pre-existing project, but is free to imagine his own. If he can convince the right person that his project is interesting, he can fund it himself with relatively little cash.

Dan Prater is exactly this sort of citizen scientist! He was curious about the microbial succession taking place in the compost tea that he was brewing on his family’s organic farm in Indiana. So, he asked Jonathan Eisen to help him figure it out! Dan collected a time series of samples from two different batches of compost tea. He shipped the samples to UC Davis, and I prepared 16S rRNA PCR libraries from them. We went from sample collection, through a MiSeq run, to a poster at ASM (with data) in a month! <sound of my horn tooting>

If you are at ASM, you can check out this poster tomorrow, Tuesday, May 21 from 1:00-2:45pm! It’s poster #2402, entitled Phylogenetic Analysis of and Actively Aerated Compost Tea.

No lab meeting May 21st 2013

Most of the lab is attending ASM, we will not be having lab meeting this week.

Thoughts on Citizen Microbiology and upcoming session at #ASM2013

I am sitting on a Southwest Airlines flight heading to Denver for the American Society for Microbiology 2013 meeting. At 3 PM today I am scheduled to co-chair (with David Coil from my lab) a session on “Citizen Microbiology” (well the full title is Citizen Microbiology: Enhancing Microbiology Education and Research with the Help of the Public). The schedule of the session is at the bottom of this post but it promises to be very interesting and exciting (no bias here at all).

As far as I know, this is the first session ever on “Citizen Microbiology” at a large meeting of any kind. We held a small workshop at UC Davis in January of 2012 on Citizen Microbiology but that was quite small. I note – I use a very broad definition for Citizen Microbiology including basically any project that engages the public in some way to participate in a research project relating to microbes. This is the perfect time to have such a session at a large meeting and the ASM General Meeting is an ideal setting. There are a series of converging forces that makes this timing ideal including:

There is a growing appreciation of microbes and the role they play on the planet. Some of this appreciation is broad – covering all microbes – all the time – everywhere. But much of it is due to a growing interest in the microbes closer to us – those that live in and on us (the human microbiome) – those that live in and on plants and animals and other organisms we care about – and those that live in the places where we spend much of our time (the microbes of the built environment). I mean – come on – everyone is talking about fecal transplants now in public – in cover stories of the NY Times Magazine and in Ted talks.

  • Technological and scientific advances have made it possible to better sample the microbes found in any particular location. Clearly, DNA sequencing technology and associated analytical tools are a central component of these advances, but other factors are important too. 
  • The world is becoming more and more digital which makes the sharing of information (which is key to Citizen Science) easier and better. And social media has made it easier to communicate and discuss actions like Citizen Microbiology. 
  • Citizen Science is growing by leaps and bounds in other areas (e.g., check out http://www.scistarter.com). 
  • Crowdsourcing (not the same thing as Citizen Science – more on this another time perhaps) is also growing in leaps and bounds. 
  • Crowdfunding is providing new ways to fund scientific activities. 
  • Sensors of all kinds are getting cheaper and easier to use and are being deployed widely. 
  • Many people are becoming more and more interesting in recording information about themselves and sharing it with others. 
  • The “open science” movement is making the literature, software, methods and data and more available to everyone with no or few restrictions thus allowing for more people in diverse environments to become engaged in research. 
  • Microbiology education and outreach is spreading with some great journalists and diverse other sources of information including hundreds of microbiology blogs and many other forms of social media being used. 

These are but a few of the reasons why I believe the time is right for Citizen Microbiology. But there are also what I would call somewhat negative reasons why the time is right too. These include 

  • Germophobia is rampant and fueled by media hype and marketing forces. 
  • We have done, and continue to do, serious harm to our microbial world. Antibiotics are overused. Antimicrobials are in everything. More and more children and missing out on vaginal birth. And so on 
  • Although our understanding of the importance of microbes is everywhere, there are also many who are overselling what we know – claiming that probiotics will cure all ailments for example. 
  • Some information about microbes that is out there on the web is, well, less that ideal 
  • The ethics of engaging the public in studies of microbes are not fully appreciated by some and not completely understood by most. 

So this is both an exciting and a critical time for microbes and microbiology. And I hope that this session will not only help launch the field of Citizen Microbiology, but will help get everyone to think about the bigger issues and how to move the field forward in the right directions. For there is so much we need to do and think about including

  • Ethics 
  • Funding 
  • Openness and sharing 
  • Visualization 
  • Analysis tools 
  • Communication 
  • Outreach 

And of course – the people at the session are not the only ones engaged in Citizen Microbiology or related activities (see a list we made a while back here). If you are doing a project please post something about it here. And if you are not doing a Citizen Microbiology project – well – why not? Get your act together.

Anyway – got to put away the computer as we land in Denver soon and I will rush off to the conference center, hopefully on time, to chair this exciting session. And I hope to see you there or have you follow online (check out the Twitter hash tag #ASM2013). And keep your eyes open for more excitement in this area.

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Today’s session at ASM 2013:

(Division W Lecture) Authentic Research for Novice Scientists: Phage Discovery and Genomics by Undergraduate Students
Graham Hatfull;
Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

Understanding Human Influence on Microbial Distribution Patterns in the United States: A Citizen Science Approach
G. Barguil Colares1, J. Marcell1, D. Smith1,2, J. A. Eisen3, J. Gilbert1,2;
1Argonne Natl. Lab., Lemont, IL, 2Univ. of Chicago, IL, 3UC Davis, Davis, CA.

The Home MIcrobiome Project: Learning the Lessons of Citizen Science and Communication
J. A. Gilbert, D. Smith;
Argonne Natl. Lab., Lemont, IL.

The New National Lab: How Citizen Science is Transforming American Research
Darlene Cavalier;
Sci. Starter, Sci. Cheerleader, Philadelphia, PA.

Sequencing the Human Microbiome with Citizen Science
Z. Apte1, J. Richman2, W. Ludington3;
1uBiome, Inc, San Francisco, CA, 2Oxford Univ., Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM, 3Univ. of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.

The American Gut Project: Challenges and opportunities for crowdsourcingmicrobial ecology
Antonio Gonzalez Peña;
Univ Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO.

Public Science in Private Places: A Study of the Microbial Ecology of One Thousand Houses in Fifty States and Five Countries
Rob Dunn;
NC State Univ., Raleigh, NC.

UPDATE: Notes from the Session Added 5/23

Here are some notes from the meeting:
Meeting Report: ASM 2013 in Denver, Day 1
ASM 2013, Day 1: From Oceans to Guts
Citizens doing Science, or Science on Citizens? (ASM 2013: Post 1)
Symbionticism: ASM 2013 LINKS
Storify by SPONCH

My storify embedded below

//storify.com/phylogenomics/asm2013-citizen-microbiology/embed//storify.com/phylogenomics/asm2013-citizen-microbiology.js[View the story “#ASM2013 Citizen Microbiology” on Storify]

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Excellent piece in the NY Times Magazine by @michaelpollan "Some of my best friends are germs" #ASM2013

Quick post here.  There is a really nice piece on in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Michael Pollan on the human microbiome: Say Hello to the 100 Trillion Bacteria That Make Up Your Microbiome.  In it he discusses how he had his microbiome typed by the American Gut Project  and he discusses browsing through the output.  He also discusses a diversity of issues in the microbiome and work of various folks.  People featured include Justin Sonnenburg, Rob Knight, Burce German, Catherine Lozupone, Stanley Falkow, Jeffrey Gordon, Michael Fischback, Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, Martin Blaser, Ruth Ley, Andrew Gewirtz, Patrice Cani, Erica Sonnenburg, and Stephen O’Keefe.  The article does a really good job of highlighting why the microbiome is important yet does not oversell what we know at this point.

I note – Pollan came to UC Davis as part of his research for the article a little while back.  Below are some pics of him getting a tour of the UC Davis LEED Platinum brewing facility.  Anyway the article is definitely worth a look.  And just in time for the ASM 2013 Meeting which I am about to head to this AM.

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Just in time for #ASM2013 – FDA adding regulations for fecal transplants #microbiome

Well, I guess this could be good news or bad news or both.  The FDA has sniffed the winds of microbiome studies and decided that it wants some more regulation on fecal transplants (aka fecal bacteriotherapy).  See for example Fecal Transplant: FDA Wants Regulation.  Fecal transplants are spreading like crazy these days and every where I go in real life and online I hear and see more about them.   For more on fecal transplants see some of my previous posts such as More (you know you wanted it) on fecal transplants and the microbiome and Fecal transplants in the news and Transfaunation and Fecal Transplants: What Goes Around Comes Around, Literally and Figuratively.

I guess the FDA feels like they have to do something given the spread of FT.   Given how many scam artists and oversellers of the microbiome are out there I think some sort of increased protection or regulation is probably a good thing.  But I am not sure what the best way to do this is.  Clearly some are unhappy with the FDA sticking their noses into fecal transplants (e.g., see here).  But given how little we know about FTs other than as treatment for Clostridium dificile infections it seems like one could make a reasonable argument for more regulation or caution.  It seems strange though that we can do just about anything and everything we want to kill all the microbes around us with very little regulation and yet attempting to manipulate the microbes in and on us or add a few here and there is being regulated more.

What do others think?  Do we need more regulation from the FDA on fecal transplants?

UPDATE – some links to other discussions of this:

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens paper out (Jennifer Flanagan)

The second-to-last undergraduate genome paper is out.   Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens by Jennifer Flanagan.

Thanks to Software Carpentry (@swcarpentry) for coming to #UCDavis

Quick post here.  Jenna Lang in my lab has a post at microBEnet about the recent workshop that the Software Carpentry folks ran at UC Davis: Software Carpentry comes to UC Davis! | microBEnet: The microbiology of the Built Environment network.  It was a major success.  For those who don’t know Software Carpentry’s mission is is to build basic computing skills among researchers.  From their web site:

Software Carpentry helps researchers be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. We run boot camps at dozens of sites around the world, and also provide open access material online for self-paced instruction. The benefits are more reliable results and higher productivity: a day a week is common, and a ten-fold improvement isn’t rare.

A great idea and done really well.  Others out there should consider hosting or attending one of their Boot Camps and checking out their materials on their web site.  See for example their videos and their reading list and their lessons.  They really do great things …

——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

——–

Seminar at #UCDavis: Michelle Smith, Wash U, “From the clinic to the bench: Using gnotobiotic mouse models uncovers a role for the gut microbiota in malnutrition”

Michelle Smith from Wash U in St. Louis

Meyer Hall, Room 1138. Noon. 5/16/2013

"From the clinic to the bench: Using gnotobiotic mouse models uncovers
a role for the gut microbiota in malnutrition"

Abstract from recent Science paper:

Kwashiorkor, an enigmatic form of severe acute malnutrition, is the
consequence of inadequate nutrient intake plus additional
environmental insults. To investigate the role of the gut microbiome,
we studied 317 Malawian twin pairs during the first 3 years of life.
During this time, half of the twin pairs remained well nourished,
whereas 43% became discordant, and 7% manifested concordance for acute
malnutrition. Both children in twin pairs discordant for kwashiorkor
were treated with a peanut-based, ready-to-use therapeutic food
(RUTF). Time-series metagenomic studies revealed that RUTF produced a
transient maturation of metabolic functions in kwashiorkor gut
microbiomes that regressed when administration of RUTF was stopped.
Previously frozen fecal communities from several discordant pairs were
each transplanted into gnotobiotic mice. The combination of Malawian
diet and kwashiorkor microbiome produced marked weight loss in
recipient mice, accompanied by perturbations in amino acid,
carbohydrate, and intermediary metabolism that were only transiently
ameliorated with RUTF. These findings implicate the gut microbiome as
a causal factor in kwashiorkor.

Seminar at #UCDavis: C. Sue Carter “The healing power of love: an oxycontin hypothesis”

Sue Carter flyer fn.pdf

Seminar 5/14 4PM: Gideon Bradburd Disentangling effects of geographic & ecological isolation on genetic differentiation

CPB Seminar Series: Spring 2013

When: Tuesdays, 4:10 – 5:30PM

Where: 1022 Life Sciences Building

May 14: Gideon Bradburd, Graduate Student
Center for Population Biology, UC Davis
Title: “Disentangling the effects of geographic and ecological isolation on genetic differentiation”