Don't hesitate, nominate!

Did you know today was International Women's Day? (I didn't, thanks Google!).

Celebrate by checking out a great post about gender inequities in nominations and awards for American Geophysical Union (AGU) Honors by Jessica Ball who writes at Magma Cum Laude at AGU blogs. (you gotta love a good academics/volcano/latin pun :)

Make a difference and nominate someone for an AGU honor before March 15!  
Read through the award list, requirements and the FAQ and see what YOU can do to recognize people.

Story behind the paper

My first paper on my dissertation work studying the pink berry microbial consortia was recently published - YAY!  To give folks some insight as to why I'm so excited about this project, I wrote a "Story behind the paper" article as a guest post on my adviser Jonathan Eisen's blog.  Check it out!

Story behind the paper:

http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2014/03/guest-post-by-lizzy-wilbanks-story.html

Actual publication:

Wilbanks EG, Jaekel U, Salman V, Humphrey PT, Eisen JA, Facciotti MT, Zinder SH, Buckley DH, Druschel GK, Fike DA, Orphan VJ. (Accepted, 2014). Microscale sulfur cycling in the phototrophic pink berry consortia of the Sippewissett Salt Marsh. Environmental Microbiology. doi:10.1111/1462-2920.12388

Aren't they just darling?

The pink berries, bright little balls of bacteria, in a handful of marsh sediment

Getting started!

Below is one of my very favorite quotes.  It beautifully captures the reason I love my job as a microbial ecologist.  Studying more-or-less invisible creatures may sound boring or frustrating, but with a just little bit of vision, it's one of the most exciting expeditions imaginable. 

This is my vision for the Wild Microbe blog: to share little pieces of this world with you through stories about my own experiences, musing about amazing microbes, and overviews of recent publications.  Stay tuned!

"If I could do it all over again, and relive my vision in the twenty-first century, I would be a microbial ecologist. 

Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science.  Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. 

I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs.  All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building.

The jaguars, ants and the orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end. "

–E.O. Wilson, The Naturalist