Latest Posts

  • Information Overload!

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    This week Ana and Rachel attended a workshop on metagenomics hosted by Liz Dinsdale at San Diego State University.  From DNA extraction all the way through sequencing and analysis, we were able to produce metagenomes from shotgun sequencing from some of our samples and hope that they will add some interesting comparisons to our 16S…

  • We made it!

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    Sunrise over the Atlantic. We hit our funding goal yesterday, thanks to all of you who donated to this project…thank you! We are so touched by the number of people who felt moved by the project and supported us.  So what is next? We are currently in the process of crunching the data of our…

  • Microbes on PET bottles

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    Reproduced from the article: Fig 5. PET and glass biomarkers identified by linear discriminant analysis This article just appeared in PLOS One: Microbes on a Bottle: Substrate, Season and Geography Influence Community Composition of Microbes Colonizing Marine Plastic Debris A quick read showed a similar approach to our idea, but using PET bottles (which is not floating plastic).…

  • High price for gnarly waves in polluted waters

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    I just read this article about the risks of surfing after storms, and the presence of Vibrios in coastal waters, particularly in San Diego.   Click to read article Specifically referring to wastewater treatment and runoff management, one of the reasons for our project has been to explore if plastic pollution exacerbates the risk of infections,…

  • Final week!

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    As we approach the beginning of August we are also approaching the last week of our fundraising efforts on experiment.com. Thanks to our latest backers we are now at 30% of our goal, and we hope that with some nudging we’ll be able to get there. Please spread the word! Some cool things will be happening…

  • Plastic Cleanup & Plastic Bag Bans

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    This morning this video popped up in my FB feed, posted by the Story of stuff project: Yeah…pretty depressing.  On the other hand, can you imagine the microbes teeming on those piles of plastic? Or how the population in the water may be affected by the presence of plastic (probably full of organic material to…

  • Sequencing data are in!

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    So this morning the email arrived from Omega Biotek that the sequencing data of the beach run were in. It is uploaded to the Illumina Basespace platform, and besides all the raw data files there are also all kind of colorful graphs and numbers for us the non-bioinformaticians to check out. First thing that jumped…

  • Previous Research

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    For a vivid and engaging overview of the background to this project I recommend watching the documentary Into the Gyre, which can be rented or purchased through Vimeo On Demand. You can see Emelia in the video explaining the study on the microbes inhabiting the microplastics. For a scientific article, one of the most seminal…

  • Validation of the system

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    The validation run took place March-April 2015, in the Agua Hedionda Lagoon, Carlsbad, CA. Reason to choose this location was the ease to deploy and collect samples attached to a dock. Our goals were to test the sterilization method of the plastics (ethanol washes and UV irradiation), control for possible contamination due to manipulation when…