A group of us from Jonathan Eisen’s lab attended the General Meeting for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) last month in Boston. A major highlight of the conference was “We Are Not Alone: Microbial Revelations of the Built Environment,” a symposium that was organized by the Junior Advisory Group that is made up of postdocs and …
“Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth” Indoor Air journal, accepted for publication Abstract Green building materials are becoming more popular. However, little is known about their ability to support or limit microbial growth. The growth of fungi was evaluated on five building materials. Two green, two conventional building materials and wood …
You can download the database of over 360 publications that report characteristics of the indoor environment along with the microbes found in the studies. Each publication is entered as a record and includes citation, abstract, keywords, organisms, substrates, and environmental conditions as reported by the authors. The database in MS Access format is searchable for …
Among the cleanest and wealthiest countries in the world, Finland has the highest rate of Type 1 diabetes, while other messier and poorer countries have much lower rates. A recent article in the Washington Post discusses ongoing research to explore how exposure to dust and bacteria in houses might contribute to the onset of Type …
Are the microbes in our homes alive, or are they dead? If they are alive, what are they doing? We plan to answer these questions during my MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bacteria in house dust can originate from places such as the outdoors or from the bodies of humans. …
Just received an announcement that a new project has been funded through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment. The project is titled “The House Dust Fungal Microbiome — Influences and Effects.” and the PI is Susan V. Lynch from UCSF. She kindly sent us a summary description of the …
Just a short post here about an interesting paper that came out a few weeks ago (not open access, here’s the press release). This group showed that the bacterial protein flagellin can exacerbate allergic reactions to house dust (at least in mice). What’s interesting to me is that flagellin itself is not an allergen, it …
Well, normally I find popular press stories about getting rid of dust and bacteria to be mostly fear mongering. But this article from WebMD (which much of the time I have complaints about) actually seems worth a look: Are Vacuum Cleaners Bad for Your Health?. The article discusses in part new work from Australian researchers on …
The International Society of Exposure Science, ISES, will hold its annual conference October 23-27 in Baltimore. The Society has invited all participants to bring dust samples for its Metals in Dust Samples Study. “A special ISES Metals in House Dust Study will analyze house dust samples supplied by the meeting attendees and report results at …
Well this is disconcerting. A scientist who works for the Naval War College (Mark Lyles) has been doing research on dust from the War Zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. And the results appear to be disconcerting. All sorts of elevated levels of toxins are reported to have been found in the dust. Though I …