Applied and Environmental Science
Commentary | Applied and Environmental ScienceApplication of a Database-Independent Approach To Assess the Quality of Operational Taxonomic Unit Picking MethodsAssignment of 16S rRNA gene sequences to operational taxonomic units (OTUs) allows microbial ecologists to overcome the inconsistencies and biases within bacterial taxonomy and provides a strategy for clustering similar sequences that do not have representatives in a reference database.
Editor's Pick Research Article | Applied and Environmental ScienceGeography and Location Are the Primary Drivers of Office Microbiome CompositionOur study highlights several points that should impact the design of future studies of the microbiology of BEs. First, projects tracking changes in BE bacterial communities should focus sampling efforts on surveying different locations in offices and in different cities but not necessarily different materials or different offices in the same city. Next, disturbance due to repeated sampling, though detectable, is small compared to that...
Commentary | Applied and Environmental ScienceThe Built Environment Is a Microbial WastelandHumanity’s transition from the outdoor environment to the built environment (BE) has reduced our exposure to microbial diversity. The relative importance of factors that contribute to the composition of human-dominated BE microbial communities remains largely unknown.