Everyone likes a good mystery story. Particularly when it involves some unknown kind of bacteria growing underwater on spent nuclear fuel rods with no obvious carbon source for growth. Stay tuned.
Just a quick reminder that the Sloan Foundation is offering a postdoctoral fellowship in the microbiology of the built environment and applications are due September 1st. Read our previous post about the position here, see the official RFP here, check out the new FAQ here, and see the selection committee here.
With the publication of the 6th and last genome paper to come out of our Undergraduate Genome Sequencing Project I thought this would be a good time to reflect on how it all went. To summarize, we had a group of undergraduate students go out into the built environment and attempt to find microbes whose …
The most recent Sloan-funded project began work in the lab of Roberto Kolter in early July. The name of the project is “The Effects of Surface pH on Microbial Community Composition and Susceptibility to Invasion”. Unlike many of the previous projects funded by the microbiology of the built environment program, this is an experimental lab …
I’ve posted a couple of times in the past about the potential for using copper in the built environment to limit bacterial growth and/or pathogenicity (e.g. here and here). I’ve heard and read things about copper which cover the whole spectrum from “it’s a magic bullet” to “snake oil”. I’m guessing it’s somewhere in …
Yet another Legionella outbreak, this time in a retirement home in Ohio that has killed 6 people and sickened a couple dozen others. I feel like the rate of new stories about Legionella outbreaks (at least in the US) has been rising a lot the last couple of years. I found some data from the …
Here’s a story that combines two of my favorite topics these days, microbes and space. In this case students from Japan are building a special satellite to house and photograph slime mold growth (Dictyostelium discoideum). I’m not sure exactly what they’ll learn from this, but it sounds cool! Pictures and data will be publicly available …
Interesting article from a couple days ago talking about the procedures used to assess salmonella contamination in poultry processing plants and some of the issues therein. Not recommended reading if you’re having chicken for dinner anytime soon. h/t to Paula for sending us the link to this article.
Well only a mere couple of months after the 2nd Annual Sloan Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference ended I’ve finally gotten all of the talks up onto YouTube. There’s a few missing (opted out or technical problems) but most of them are there. It was a great and informative series of …
Had to post about this recent paper that came out in PLOS ONE, “Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa“. Obviously we’re thinking a lot about bacterial activity in space, apropos of our Project MERCCURI work. Really the title says it all here. Biofilms are awesome. Space is awesome. Turns out that biofilms in space …