TIEDJE SYMPOSIUM: A Success!
A day of reunion and celebration, Saturday, October 29, 2011, in honor of Jim Tiedje (not a retirement!). A day full of talks and posters from former and present Tiedje lab personnel followed by a reception and dinner at the Kellogg Center. Check the agenda at http://tiedjesymposium.mmg.msu.edu and see the professional photo album at http://www.flickr.com/photos/69569599@N06/

AMAZING! We now have three distinguished faculty members who have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences! Congratulations to newest academy member, Dr. Richard Lenski (see article, May 2006), as he joins two other CME faculty members, Dr. James M. Tiedje and Dr. Michael F. Thomashow who were elected in 2003. (see article, May 2003)

The MSU Center for Microbial Ecology is pleased to announce the release of our CMEIAS Color Segmentation Version 1.0 Software. This stand-alone program is an improved computing technology designed to alleviate the laborious task of segmenting foreground pixels from background in complex color and grayscale images of environmental samples. These image editing steps are required before object analysis and classification.

And check our newest version of the Center for Microbial Ecology Image Analysis System (CMEIAS software), designed to strengthen microscopy-based approaches for understanding microbial ecology. To learn more about CMEIAS and download its free program files and operator manuals, go to http://cme.msu.edu/cmeias/

Ribosomal Database Project II - NEW RDP Release 10. Release 10, Update 28 (12 Jan 2012) contains 2,110,258 aligned and annotated Bacterial and Archaeal small-subunit rRNA sequences, with additions made monthly. Announcing the RDP Fungal LSU Classifier (large subunit rRNA gene): The hierarchy model used by RDP Classifier has been updated to training set No. 7. There are 10,046 sequences included in the new training set (19% more than the previous training set No. 6). About 1% public RDP sequences changed phyla. About 4.9% of sequences were classified to greater taxonomic depth in the new release, while about 4.8% were classified with confidence at lesser levels. See more rearrangements details at http://rdp.cme.msu.edu/misc/rel10info.jsp#taxonomy. Our thanks to Cheryl Kuske and colleagues for providing the hierarchy model and training set. Try the new myRDP SRA Prepkit to help prepare and manage the documents required for submitting Pyrosequencing data to Short Read Archive. It's available at Pyrosequencing Pipeline (tools to facilitate the data processing and simplify the computationally intensive analysis of such large sequencing libraries). RDP SOAP web services for Seqmatch and Classifier are available. Instructors: try our new "Assisgnment Generator" for your class. RDP 10 introduces an updated alignment strategy as well as a new Archaeal alignment. Explore our beta version of the new Taxomatic visualization tool. Find sequences from completed genomes by searching with the GenBank Project ID and view sequences from the Whole Genome Project with our new Genome Viewer. http://rdp.cme.msu.edu

Check out the new tools in our Functional Gene Pipeline.

	What is the CME?  A brief description of the Center's organization and activities.
	Research Program:  Descriptions of CME research initiatives.
	Graduate Education:  Information about the CME graduate education program.
	Industrial Outreach:  Collaborations between CME and industry.
	Educational Outreach:  CME activities targeted toward young people and educators. Visit the Microbe Zoo!