Author Archives: Jeff

We just finished a crazy few days of sampling and I’m only now, back in Seattle, getting a moment to assimilate all of it.  The Icy World team from JPL arrived late in the day on May 1, and we … Continue reading →

I’ll be taking off for Barrow in just a few hours, the last field effort of my dissertation – and my last chance at collecting frost flowers!  This will be my 6th trip up in the last four years, although … Continue reading →

But you can grow flowers there. As readers of this blog know, one of the Deming Lab’s major research directions is the microbiology of the sea ice surface – frost flowers, saline snow, and related features.  Since the sea ice … Continue reading →

I got an email the other day from a colleague who teaches science at Soap Lake High School, a rural high school in eastern Washington that, in my opinion, punches above its weight in the sciences.  One of his students … Continue reading →

****************** Updated method posted here: https://www.polarmicrobes.org/?p=859 ****************** But they’re not.  Getting meaningful taxonomy from blast results is one of those things.  Here’s the situation: I ran a blastn search locally against the NCBI nt (nucleotide) database, saving the output in … Continue reading →

In the previous post I described a method for efficiently blasting a medium-large dataset (33 million sequences).  One down side to using blast on a dataset this size is the very large size of the output xml file, in this … Continue reading →