New grant in Sloan Program: Microbes of built environments spanning human urbanization

The Sloan Foundation has made a few new grants as part of their microbiology of built environment program.  Here’s a description of the most recent, being undertaken by Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello at the University of Puerto Rico:

Title: Microbes of built environments spanning human urbanization

“Little attention has been paid to the microbes that live in buildings, and the effect of forms of construction throughout the evolution of lifestyles from pre-modern hunter-gathers to modern cities. This project will fill this gap by studying the environmental microbes in houses in a gradient of acculturation, from remote ancestral lifestyle villages in the Amazon to modern urban houses, and determine microbial transmission between the skin and objects and surfaces of the home.  We propose to determine bacterial and fungal taxonomic and metagenomic composition of the surfaces and objects (10 per home) and the skin of the home inhabitants (10 samples) in 10 homes from 4 communities, with different degrees of Westernization, from remote Amerindian villages to urban modern houses in Peru.”