Story behind the paper: Porphyrobacter mercurialis, a new species found by #citizenscience and then sent to the #iss

So our first attempt at entering the world of bacterial taxonomy and the description of a new species came out today with the thrilling title of “Porphyrobacter mercurialis sp. nov., isolated from a stadium seat and emended description of the genus Porphyrobacter“. The story leading to this paper took us into  a lot of new …

Microbial sampling starts in Cherokee Homes

(This is a guest post by Jordan Peccia at Yale University) After a six-month period of home recruitment, surface and aerosol sampling campaigns have begun in an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indoor microbiome sponsored project awarded to Tulsa and Yale Universities. The goal of this proposed research is to explore how two central and modifiable …

More Fresh Air in Classrooms Means Fewer Absences « Berkeley Lab News Center

(Author’s note, this article is a bit out of date but I just found this draft and am posting it because I think it’s still an interesting study) Trying to get outside my microbiology comfort zone and post some more about building science.  A recent study finding that more fresh air in classrooms correlated with …

Indoor Air 2016: Call for Abstracts (Due October 15th)

(thanks to Paula Olsiewski for the reminder, text below from ISIAQ)   INDOOR AIR 2016   July 3-8th 2016, Ghent, Belgium Important dates: abstract submission closes: October 15th 2015 submission page abstracts acceptance notification:  December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission opens: December 1st 2015 extended abstract / full paper submission closes: February …

Taking Aim at Microbes on Farm Good Strategy for Food Safety | Food Safety News

Going through some old draft microBEnet posts and came across this one, “Taking Aim at Microbes on Farm Good Strategy for Food Safety | Food Safety News”.  This is a nice article about microbiological control at food production facilities… but that doesn’t just focus on the (justifiably) scary antibotic resistance breeding ground angle.   This article …

Metanalysis: Cleaning Hospital Room Surfaces to Prevent Health Care—Associated Infections

I recently came across this detailed review “Metanalysis: Cleaning Hospital Room Surfaces to Prevent Health Care—Associated Infections” from the Annals of Internal Medicine.  I think this is a fascinating topic because hospitals have to walk such a fine line with regards to microbes.  On the one hand they want to avoid the probably counter-productive “kill …

Storify of tweets from Microbiology of the Built Environment 2015

Sadly I was unable to make the MoBE 2015 meeting… it’s the first one I’ve missed since they started in 2012.  From following the tweets, it sounded like a great and productive meeting as usual!   Here’s the Storify for anyone else who wants to see what happened… hopefully we’ll get out some blog posts from …