Fun with Google News Archive: Early article on discovery of bacterial cause of “Legion disease” #microBEnet

Just a quick one here.  The Google News archive has all sorts of interesting stuff in there.  Much of it is not fully free / in the open but it is still interesting.  For example, – check out this article reporting the first association of a bacterial association with “Legion disease”: St. Petersburg Times – Google …

Yes, Virginia, your soap and dispenser are not actually clean #shocking #microBEnet

A new paper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology is not surprisingly getting a bunch of press “Bacterial Hand Contamination and Transfer after Use of Contaminated Bulk-Soap-Refillable Dispensers” by Zapka et al.  I note the article is freely available online. Some of the news stories about this include:   Bacteria-Laden Soap Not So Clean : Discovery …

Genomic standards for microbial ecology studies (including built environment)

There is a new #openaccess article in ISME of great importance to those studying the microbiology of the built environment: The ISME Journal – The genomic standards consortium: bringing standards to life for microbial ecology.  This article focuses mostly on those characterizing “marker genes” (i.e., genes of value in phylogenetic characterization of taxa) in some way. …

Nice title: A glimpse under the rim — the composition of microbial biofilm communities in domestic toilets

OK, so the article is a few years old (and not open access) but it should win a prize for best/worst title in a recent paper on indoor microbiology:  A glimpse under the rim — the composition of microbial biofilm communities in domestic toilets – Egert – 2009 – Journal of Applied Microbiology I note …

Norman Pace visits UC Davis

Norman R. Pace, from UC Boulder, gave a talk at UC Davis yesterday about microbial diversity.  In his talk he discussed some of his recent Sloan Foundation funded work on “microbiology of the built environment” including studies of shower heads, indoor swimming pools, water supplies, and hospitals. Pace is one of the pioneers of DNA …