According to various news stories that we’ve blogged about in the last year you should worry about “germs” on your cellphone, doorknobs, toothbrush, dishwasher, houseplants, lemon slices, bouncy houses, laundry, etc. Not to mention avoiding handshakes… or really any contact with other living beings such as your dog or cat. So this got me thinking… …
Just received word about a newly funded project to standardize metadata collection within the microbiology of the built environment community. This project is being undertaken by Lynn Schriml at the University of Maryland and her description is below: This metadata standards project, led by Lynn Schriml (University of Maryland School of Medicine, Institute for Genome …
Just got this announcement from ASM for anyone who might be interesting in grant opportunities relating to the microbiology of food safety. Dear Colleague: The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has requested that ASM bring to the attention of interested members the following Food Safety Challenge Area RFA:
Just a quick “save the date” note here. The 3rd annual Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment will be held at the Boulder Marriott (same as last year) on June 4-6 2014. This conference is typically limited to Sloan grantees, their labs, and various folks from the field invited by the Sloan Foundation. …
So earlier this week I wrote an article at Slate called “I would rather lick a toilet seat than cell phone”. Which was a really unfortunate title since I was trying to emphasize that toilet seats are surprisingly clean and the general point of the article was about microbial scare stories. I did not mean …
I haven’t posted in awhile about Project MERCCURI but we’ve been plugging along preparing all of our candidate bacteria to fly to the space station. This process turned out to be much much more work that we anticipated. In the end we grew up many hundreds of strains from events around the country in order …
Sometimes blogging on microBEnet feels a bit like a MadLib. There are certain recurring themes that fit the model well. For example: __________ (microbe) was recently found to do _______________ (cool thing)… IN SPAAAAACE! This has implications for future manned spaceflight missions. So here we go for today: The fungal pathogen Candida albicans was recently …
I have my share of gripes about the FDA but this seemed like a piece of welcome news. The FDA is going to look more closely at the issue of antibacterial soap (usually dosed with Triclosan which we’ve written about before, e.g. here). They’re talking about a proposed rule that would: “…require manufacturers to provide …
One of our pet peeves are the oft-repeated microbiology stories in the media that consist of “OMG we found bacteria on your chair/house/keyboard/dishwasher/cell phone/toys/books/doorknobs/dusters/vacuum cleaners/”. There are three issues with this kind of story; firstly that bacteria are everywhere so no shockers about finding them on your cell phone. Secondly, most of these stories focus …
It’s becoming increasingly well-established that microbes behave differently in microgravity than on Earth… that’s one of the justifications for our own Project MERCCURI. Some previous work has focused on the ability of microbes to survive higher-than-normal levels of antibiotics when grown in space, though the mechanism for this is not at all understood. This article …