Dr. Gary Andersen and Gabrielle Pecora depart for Port au Prince, Haiti at the end of this week to implement Stage I of the DNA Everywhere Project at Dr. Sasha Kramer’s SOIL Project. Bringing with them two complete DNA Everywhere DNA Extraction kits and set ups, Andersen and Pecora will train 6 SOIL employees how to extract bacterial DNA from SOIL compost. DNA will be shipped from Port au Prince to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for microbial community analysis. While there, Pecora will conduct over 50 extractions of strategically selected samples to provide a blanketed baseline of microbial communities throughout the composting process. Check back at the end of October for a trip summary!

 

Under construction

The PhyloChip and Second Genome are joining the American Gut initiative to “explore the connection between the human microbiome and type 2 diabetes.” This is a great example of how the technology that has stemmed from Berkeley Lab’s Gary Andersen (also leading researcher on the Thermopile Project) can aid other researchers’ work and develop  a vast reference dataset of microbiomes. Both Andersen and Second Genome have helped the American Gut Project to “build the world’s largest open-source, community driven, effort to “characterize the microbiomes of everyday people in order to understand the connections between environmental factors and microbiome changes.”

Read the full article here: http://techblog.lbl.gov/2013/03/lab-technology-spans-new-research-opportunities/