Uptake specificity as a tool for microbiome research

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Sorry for neglecting you, blog.

So Rosie and I are headed to the Human Microbiome Meeting here in Vancouver in just over a week. This means there's two posters to make! AAccK! We'll be a little out-of-place at the meeting, since our work is mostly in the lab, but we're hoping to learn more about the normal environment of H. influenzae and maybe even find people with access to mucus interested in bacterial genetic exchange.

So our posters won't be directly about the microbiome, but instead one will be about our genomics of natural transformation experiment, and the other will be about the uptake specificity measurements using deep sequencing. As I was thinking about the future of the uptake specificity work, it occurred to me that we could use H. influenzae as a way to filter Haemophilus and other Pasterellaceaen chromosomal fragments from a lung mucus DNA sample, for example. This would at least be a good way to screen out the gobs and gobs of human DNA likely there (at least most of it) and maybe focus a microbiome project down to a narrowish group... save a lot of money that way...