New Lab Matters: The promise and challenge of newborn screening in 2019

New Lab Matters cover depicts a newborn baby

Newborn screening is a public health success story, ongoing for 56 years. On the one hand, new treatment and laboratory testing options open up the possibility of expanded screening panels. On the other hand, testing laboratories and follow-up providers are generally under-resourced and straining to keep pace with growing workloads. But as our feature article shows, scientists are working diligently to improve the accuracy and precision of existing tests and to bring on new disorders, even as they continue the high-stakes work of screening tens of thousands of infants a year.

Here are just a few of this issue’s highlights:

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The post New Lab Matters: The promise and challenge of newborn screening in 2019 appeared first on APHL Lab Blog.

Wrap up of recent posts of relevance on microBEnet

I have been doing a lot of blogging at microBEnet and don't always do a good job of cross posting or even posting here to let people know of the cross talk / related posts.

So I am trying to do that briefly now.  Here are some posts from the last few months on microBEnet that may be of interest, These are posts from March through today.


The Art of Science: A Handful of Dust

Lucie Libotte, Dust Matters, Ceramic, 2014

Lucie Libotte, Dust Matters, Ceramic, 2014

Science is increasingly focusing on whole environments – ranging from our guts to the ocean – exploring how all the parts of a system work together to function in a healthy way. Lucie Libotte’s 2014 work, Dust Matters, now on exhibit at the Science Gallery in Dublin, creates art from one of the inescapable elements of our domestic environment – dust.

In a kind of “citizen sciart” project, Libotte had a group of friends in various areas of the UK collect dust from their homes. She then fired the dust as a coating on ceramic vessels, which look strikingly varied. Says the artist, “Dust Matters’ aim is to re-evaluate this ‘dirt’, and convey the value of dust as an indicator of our environment, showing how it reflects our daily life and traces our journey through the world.”

Libotte’s work is part of an exhibition at the Science Gallery called HOME\SICK: POST-DOMESTIC BLISS, which “looks at the meanings of home, from rubbish to robots and microbes to micro-dwellings, asking whether the changing nature of home is for better or worse.”

HOME\SICK, which runs through July 17, features the work of many other artists, scientists and designers, including the microbial bellybutton stylings of Finch & Pea friends Rob Dunn and Holly Menninger of North Carolina State University.

You can get lots more information about the show at the Science Gallery website.


Filed under: The Art of Science Tagged: Dust art, Lucie Libotte, MicroBEnet, microbiome art, science art, Science Gallry

How to keep up with microbial ecology and the built environment: microBEnet is your place

Just posting a wrap up of posts on microBEnet (where I blog frequently as do many other folks that work on something related to microbial ecology, the built environment, or the intersection of the two).  microBEnet is really becoming a central place to find out what is going on in the world of microbial ecology and the built environment.  And I love that we are getting more and more posts from outsiders about their work, their meetings, their ideas and more.  Anyway - here is a wrap up of the posts for the last month.  If you are interesting in joining microBEnet and writing posts about relevant topics, let me know.

Jenna Lang (staff scientist in my lab) -- meeting reports from a Planetary Protection meeting
My posts:
Alexander Sczyrba on the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI)

Elisabeth Bik from Stanford roundups from Microbiome Digest
David Coil (a staff scientist at UC Davis in my lab)
Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech
Rachel Adams - post doc at UC Berkeley
Ben Kirkup of the  Naval Research Laboratory
Embryete Hyde from UCSD
Brent Stephens of the Illinois Institute of Technology

Who are the contaminants in your sequencing project? (crosspost from #microBEnet)

This was originally posted on microBEnet: Who are the contaminants in your sequencing project?

Well, been having many discussions recently about PCR amplification happening from "negative" controls where no sample DNA was added. Such amplification is alas pretty common - due to contamination occurring in some other material added to the PCR reaction.  Obviously it would be best to eliminate all DNA contamination of all reagents and all PCRs.  But if that does not happen, it is possible to try to detect contamination after it has happened.  Below I post some papers related to post-sequencing detection of contamination:
Any other suggestions or comments would be welcome. UPDATE 10:30 AM 7/25 - Was reminded on Twitter of a new, critically relevant publication on this issue: Reagent contamination can critically impact sequence-based microbiome analyses

Why I don’t like to pre-submit slides for talks – lessons from #AAASMoBE meeting

So - I gave a talk at a meeting on Thursday.  The meeting was called "Microbiomes of the Built Environment" and it was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and run by AAAS.

The meeting organizers, as is often the case, wanted me to submit my slides a few days in advance, in theory to make sure they were loaded into their system and that all worked OK.  Well, as usual, I did not do this.  I like to make my talks fresh - just before the meeting so that I can incorporate new ideas into them and so that they do not have that canned feeling that a lot of talks do.

My talk was to be 15 minutes long and was to focus on my Sloan Foundation funded project "microBEnet: the microbiology of the built environment network" (see http://microbe.net for information about the project). I figured, I would work on the talk on the plane - five plus hours to edit a talk I had given relatively recently on the topic of this project.  And all would be good.  Plus, United had told me there would be WiFi on the plane so if I needed any new material I should be able to get it from the web right?  Well, the flight took off on time - 8 AM on Wednesday morning.  And I opened my laptop once allowed and paid the $15+ dollars for the WiFi and got to work.  Then, about 10 minutes later, the WiFi died and despite heroic efforts by the flight attendants, it never came back. And I plugged away at my slides doing some edits of the following presentation.




I had given this talk for the Annual Sloan Foundation meeting in May of 2013. I had other talks about microBE.net but they were focused on specific aspects and this was my most recent talk on the whole project. And, well, I started doing some minor edits on it, but, well, the slides felt too filled with boring text. And it did not seem to me to capture what I wanted to talk about. So I did the one thing that always helps me in such cases. I shut my computer and got our a notebook and started writing out and drawing out what I really wanted to talk about. And I finally started to have something I liked.


I liked this because what we are trying to do with microBEnet is to create an actual network and this was a visual way of representing our network. So then I got a bit more detailed



This was better. We were trying to help people in the field and help others who might be interested get connected, stay connected, and get rapid, easy access to information and tools. For example, we have been curating a reference collection for the field. And this reference collection has a lot of inputs and a lot of potential uses. In my previous talk I just listed some of this and had a screenshot of the web site. But it would be better to show this no?



Now this was feeling even better. I had a visual framework for the talk. Now I could fill in the details of what I wanted to cover in each of the parts of the network diagram.



So now I had some idea as to what I might want to say on these topics. No slides yet, but some idea as to what I might want to cover. And then, still not back on the computer I thought it would be good to write out an outline / the flow of the talk again. So I did.



Still felt good.

Now all I needed was a title ..


And then finally I felt I could go back to the computer. And so I started working on converting this all into slides.

For the remaining 2 hours of the flight I tried but it was slow going. I wanted to make as much as possible be visual and I needed all sorts of new slides and material from the web (no web connection still) and more. We landed. I took a Taxi to the hotel. I worked on my talk a bit from my room. I emailed various people asking for certain images and slides. And then I had to go to the speaker's dinner. And I got back to my room at about 9:30. And then I worked on my talk until about 3. And finally I was close to being done. Got a very brief few hours of sleep. Got up. Went to the meeting. Did a couple of minor modifications of my slides in the back of the room. Posted my slides to Slideshare. And then gave my talk.

Here are the final slides


Not perfect. But much more visual. Much more networky. Much better at showing what we actually do and try to do on my project.  And much fresher to me so it was certainly not a canned talk.  Not a polished talk .. but not a canned one.

For more about the meeting, including videos of talks (including mine) see the Storify I made.


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 ...

Crosspost: Woohoo – two more genome announcement papers from our undergraduate project on built environment reference genomes


Crossposting this from the microBEnet blog.
Two new papers out from the microBEnet Undergraduate Research: Built Environment Reference Genomes  project:
These go with two previously published ones:
And two more coming. So proud of the undergrads in my lab who did this work and David Coil for coordinating it with help from Jenna Lang and Aaron Darling.  Undergrads at UC Davis sequencing genomes of organisms they isolated. So cool.