Next in our “People Behind the Science” video series is Amy Pruden from Virginia Tech. Dr. Pruden has recently received a Sloan grant to work on the “Effect of Pipe Materials, Water Flow, and Chemistry on the Building Plumbing Microbiome”. In this video she talks about this project and her arrival in the field of …
Personally I think the holiday season starts way too early… but given the fact that Christmas trees are already on sale (at least here in CA) I figured I could post about this article I came across today: Wyse DM & Malloch D. 1970. Christmas tree allergy: mould and pollen studies. CMA Journal 103: 1272-1276. …
Occasionally I come across a news story related to the microbiology of the built environment that I really want to blog about… but don’t know what to say. Here is such a story about a ski resort in Arizona using 100% treated sewage water for snow making and the concerns associated with that. Blog post …
French archive employees handling moldy documents were found to be more likely to experience headaches, fatigue, eye or throat irritation, coughing, and rhinorrhea (stuffy nose) than their co-workers breathing the same air but not handling moldy documents . The culture and qPCR-based analysis of air samples showed Penicillium chrysogenum, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, and Aspergillus versicolor were …
I haven’t talked a lot about this here, but in addition to the microBEnet website and conference organization we have been running a couple of undergraduate research projects related to the microbiology of the built environment. The first was a project started in January where a team of undergraduates isolated organisms from the built environment …
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 …
Quick post here. For those of you who eat or cook poultry this may interest you: Why you shouldn’t wash chicken before cooking – The Times of India. The article discusses the results of a survey done by News.com.au on whether people wash their poultry before cooking it. Seems that this is quite common in some places. …
Here’s a case of where an interesting piece of basic science, gets written up as a press release that reaches a bit too far, in particular using a headline like “Reason discovered for the toxicity of indoor mould”. That headline is a big stretch from the original article title which was “20-Residue and 11-residue peptaibols …
Rob Dunn of North Carolina State University has written a charming and fascinating piece on the microbes that inhabit our belly buttons. You can find it here on the Scientific American blog site (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/11/07/after-two-years-scientists-still-cant-solve-belly-button-mystery-continue-navel-gazing/). I strongly recommend it for the skill of his writing as well as the extremely interesting insights into the microbes in …
One of the problems I’ve faced as a microbiologist attempting to learn about the built environment is the incredible amount of snake oil and pseudoscience that swirls around the edges of the field. There’s a huge body of solid, peer-reviewed research in the field of course. But there’s a lot of company-sponsored pseudoscience out there …