Month: January 2021

Kelley Scott and Jack Gilbert in their paper entitled “Studying the Microbiology of the Indoor Environment” assert that humans spending a lot of time in the built environment (indoors), away from fresh air, might increase rates of chronic and acute illnesses. Gilbert and Scott provide evidence that bacterial 16S rRNA sequence diversity from over 200 samples from pools, bathrooms, showers, toilets, and other commonly used surfaces around different houses, all contained bacterial pathogens. The purpose of this study is to examine the ecological interactions between microorganisms built environments, as well as study and identify pathogenicity. Gilbert and Scott establish a scholarly relationships with academics in specifically bacterial molecular genetics and ecological genetics.

Peer review is the process of subjecting research to close examination by others in the same field. This can determine if a study should be published, reviewed or even completely rejected. However, even this process has numerous flaws. First of all, the peer review process is extremely prone to bias. Women are greatly underrepresented in the peer review process – this does not help with the already rampant problem of sexism in science. Specifically, there is evidence that women do not receive as many grants as men do during the peer review process. This blatant sexism I obviously problematic, however, there are definitely different solutions to make this process fair. There are many options to improve the peer review process. Blinding the reviewers, training them, opening up the process to the world or selecting the reviewers carefully, are all ways to try an improve this process. Hopefully changes happen soon but until then, the peer review process is the best we have for research criticism and examination.

I actually had a really good time with the peer reviews. It was a little difficult compared in-person peer reviews because I felt like it would have been easier to comment on things right on the paper. It felt a little tedious to go back and forth between 2 tabs constantly to write about things that I wanted to compliment or critique. Besides that technical aspect of the peer reviews, I think that something I really enjoyed was looking at other people’s citations. Personally, I did not have enough time to complete my citations because I think that I was confused as to what style I needed to use…but now I am thinking that I should have probably used ASM. I noticed that the papers I reviewed wrote about their procedures in a really concise way – it wasn’t too long and it was also super clear. I think this is definitely something that I will be fixing on my paper. Something else I noticed was that a lot of people were a little repetitive in their introduction which is also something that I believe that I did on my paper. I will also be correcting this on my paper. I am looking forward to seeing how other people corrected or critiqued my methods/procedures. While I was writing my paper I was wondering if there was a more efficient way for me to conduct my experiments. I am hoping that people gave me a couple of ideas.

A microbial population can be identified based on many characteristics, such as: morphology, cell arrangement, reproduction, growth, metabolism, pathogenesis and genetic properties. There may be many approaches to classifying and organizing a microbial population. On the other hand, a microbial community is defined as a group of microorganisms that live in the same space. This is not limited to the same types of microorganisms. In other words, in a microbial community the populations of that community may interact in may ways, for example, as predators, preys, or they may even be in symbiosis. A microbial community can be seen as smaller than a microbial population. Due to this specific distinction, microbial populations are more easily manipulated for research purposes.

Citations:

https://www.britannica.com/science/microbiology

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