Moving from commensalism to mutualism: not microbes, but the people who study them

Nice editorial in Indoor Air from Brent Stephen, Rachel Adams, Seema Bhangar, Kyle Bibby and Michael Waring: From commensalism to mutualism: integrating the microbial ecology, building science, and indoor air communities to advance research on the indoor microbiome. In it they present what they view as key findings from recent studies of microbiology of the buiolt …

Today in microbes and art: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu

Crossposting this from my Tree of Life blog. I could spend a lot of time on this website: Bioart and Bacteria – The Artwork of Anna Dumitriu.  I found out about it from a Tweet from Dumutriu: Gut #bacteria #microbiome textiles for @edenproject #art commission @tferriss @phylogenomics http://t.co/gOyEKOQM5u pic.twitter.com/BzwyvKIZC2 – anna dumitriu (@AnnaDumitriu) January 18, …

Evolution in urban environments

Nice story worth reading in New York Magazine by Ferris Jabr: Uptown Mice Are Different From Downtown Mice — NYMag.  It discusses some work on evolution in urban environments, including a little bit about work starting to be done on gut microbes of rodents and how they might be affected by urban life. Other things of …

Sloan Foundation at Healthy Buildings 2015 America

Greetings from the Healthy Buildings Conference Committee! We are excited to be hosting Healthy Buildings 2015 America in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products, and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on …

How We View Air

Whenever I got sick as a young child, my mom insisted upon opening my windows in the mornings to let fresh air in. She claimed it would help me get better if we let clean air in to flush out the dirty air. To me, it was a nuisance. I had the chills and resented …

Dairy genomes: Good example of the power of reference genomes for particular environments

Quick post here.  Just got alerted to this paper by automated searches from Pubchase: Construction of a dairy microbial genome catalog opens new perspect… – PubMed – NCBI.  This paper provides a really good example of how researchers interested in microbial ecology of a particular system (in this case, dairies and cheese) can use culturing and …

The Importance of Microbial Eukaryotes in Premise Plumbing Systems

The environmental engineering research community now recognizes that it is important to understand the bacterial ecology of premise (building) plumbing systems to control opportunistic pathogens (OP). Many investigations, including those supported by the Sloan Foundation MoBE program, have begun to shed light on the factors driving bacterial ecology in drinking water systems. While the bacterial …

Extended Abstract Deadline for Healthy Buildings America is Jan 15.

Just a quick reminder that the Abstract Deadline for Healthy Buildings America is January 15th.  This conference will take place July 19-22 in Boulder CO… just following the Sloan Microbiology of The Built Environment Conference, also in Boulder from July 15-18.    Here’s a description of the Healthy Buildings Conference: Healthy Buildings is a unique forum …