category: microbiology

Touch-free packaging for chicken

I was interviewed by BBC radio Derby to comment on new touch-free packaging for chicken being introduced by Sainsbury’s. In short I think it’s a good idea so long as it does not lead to extra plastic waste, but I also find it is normally possible to handle standard packages …

Networks of Power and Influence

This week I am attending the 33rd New Phytologist symposium (Networks of Power and Influence) with Robin Sen and Francis Brearley from MMU. I will present a poster of work supported by MMU and Moors for the Future. The poster shows a preliminary network analysis of bacterial and fungal microbial …

Reproducible research

The statistical analyses for our recent paper on the bacterial communities of biological soil crusts in the Kalahari can be fully examined and reproduced via code and data I have deposited on GitHub. The analysis relies heavily on the phyloseq package for R. The phyloseq paper and associated documentation were really an inspiration, and …

Override autocorrect in Excel cells

As a microbial ecologist I often work with spreadsheets where I want to use the header “OTU” which means operational taxonomic unit. We use this acronym instead of saying species because the species concept for microbes is not very clear. Anyway, in Excel you can’t write “OTU” in a cell …