After way more work than I imagined when we embarked on this project, we are almost ready to submit our first description of a new bacterial species, Kirrobacter mercurialis. Not exactly earth-shattering, given that about 40 bacterial species descriptions come out every month in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM). However, our …
Analysis of the growth data from space is ongoing but we have some preliminary results to share: Firstly, 47 of the 48 bacteria grew at least a little bit in space, the only exception was the sample collected from the Philadelphia Phillies dugout. Sorry guys! A number of the bacteria grew quite well in fact, …
After 9 months of technical delays, during which time our collection of frozen built environment microbes went around the earth every 90 minutes, we are finally getting growth data from the International Space Station (ISS)! Astronaut Terry Virts has been taking daily growth readings of our collection of 48 microbes and today (Friday) is …
Just a quick post here about the spreading of C. difficile among patients who visited healthcare settings but didn’t take antiobiotics. Traditionally C. difficile is thought to infect people whose normal microbiota was disturbed by antibiotics. It’s also the target of most experiments on fecal transplants since those have been shown to be very effective …
Just a quick post here on an NPR story that caught my attention “Giving Chickens Bacteria … To Keep Them Antibiotic-Free”. Unlike with humans where determining the effect of probiotics is complicated by a lot of variation in the population (genetic, cultural, diet, etc.), with a whole bunch of chickens it’s easier to measure the …
As people have probably noticed, we have an increasing number of guests posts here on microBEnet, which is awesome. This is intended to be a community resource, and we’ve been actively reaching out and recruiting people to post about their work here. To that end, I’ve just made a tutorial video that walks you through …
(Note: This post is by Hal Levin) The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has approved a grant to ISIAQ, the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, to organize a symposium at the Healthy Buildings 2015-Europe conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands, May 18- 20, 2015. The Symposium organization project will be led by Hal Levin of …
We’ve posted in the past about Baudoinia, also known as the Kentucky whiskey fungus that grows on buildings near distilleries. See our previous posts here and here. This fungus was named and characterized by James Scott from the University of Toronto. Once people affected by the fungus could pin it on the distilleries, the lawsuits …
Just a quick note to save the date for the 4th annual Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder. This year it will be held on July 15-18, so as to be right before Healthy Building America 2015, being held also in Boulder (July 19-22). Further details will be found on the conference website, …
The Sloan Foundation has recently announced their 2014 Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellows. The awards, along with the titles of the projects are below. Congrats all! Look forward to detailed blog posts from all the awardees describing their upcoming projects. Huan Gu at Syracuse, along with Dacheng Ran. “Understanding and controlling biofilms …