Identifying Location Based On The Soil's Microbial Makeup

Received this email and it raised little hairs on my neck.

from Melanie S
date Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 6:05 PM
subject JOB: soil microbiome profiling @ LLNL (must be US citizen)

Tom Slezak, Biodefense Group Leader, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://www.llnl.gov/str/April04/Slezak.html, mentioned last week at the Microarray World Congress, http://www.selectbiosciences.com/conferences/MWC2009/Agenda.aspx, that he has a funded soil microbiome profiling position currently available.

The candidate must be a US citizen, and should ideally have a PhD in a related field such as bioinformatics and 1-4 years work experience. Tom’s contact information is here: https://www.llnl.gov/str/April04/Slezak.html

Specifically, the position/project entails looking at:

* Can soil microbiome profiling characterize locations? To what resolution?
* Determine the ability to characterize locations by analyzing microbial content
* Utilize microarrays and sequencing to determine the ability to resolve where a soil sample came from or rule out locations
* Develop a soil microbiome microarray to provide a low-cost way to ‘fingerprint’ locations
* Determine degree of location resolution possible due to species-level soil microbe differences

Uh-oh Dexter, beware of that dirt on your shoes.