Another new Sloan-funded project in the microbiology of the built environment called “To analyze and model the establishment of microbial communities over time on different office surface materials in different climates”. This project is being undertaken by Greg Caporaso at Northern Arizona University. Full description below: The goal of this project is to understand successional patterns …
The Sloan foundation has recently announced funding for several new projects in the microbiology of the built environment, we’ll be describing each of them in more detail here. First is a project called “Effect of Pipe Materials, Water Flow, and Chemistry on the Building Plumbing Microbiome”. This work will be performed by Amy Pruden, Marc …
Every day there are numerous news reports dealing with “mold” and the built environment. It’s usually a mix of scaremongering, cleaning suggestions, and the occasional bit of interesting science. Generally we avoid this topic, since surprisingly little is actually known about what fungal species are actually associated with human health impacts. This story just caught …
So here’s a question. Every couple of weeks I see articles about the wonderful benefits of having plants indoors. However, we’ve published in the past about how there’s little to no evidence that plants actually do anything meaningful in terms of indoor air quality (see here and here). The new rage seems to be biowalls… …
Just a quick follow-up post here. Back in May we posted about a Wired article where they describe the interesting detective story of identifying a type of fungus that thrives on ethanol and grows extensively on and near distilleries. Being America, this was soon followed by lawsuits against the distilleries as described in a New …
Here’s a case where just the title of an article is awesome: “Pyrosequencing-Derived Bacterial, Archaeal, and Fungal Diversity of Spacecraft Hardware Destined for Mars”. Sadly it’s not open access but the abstract is worth a read at a minimum. The authors conducted environmental surveys in cleanrooms and of equipment destined for Mars. Basically they found that …
More talks of interest from the AAAR meeting coming up in a couple of months. Previous posts about this meeting can be found here, here, and here. Phylogenetic-based Fungal Population Comparisons of Dust Collected from Water-damaged and Nonwater-Damaged Homes KAREN DANNEMILLER, Jordan Peccia, Yale University Abstract Number: 327 Working Group: The Indoor Microbiome In the 5MB.2 …
A quick post here on something that’s about as close to my pet topic of “probiotics for buildings” as I’ve ever seen. This group works on wastewater treatment, starting with the fact that a lot of bacteria makes it from the filtration process into drinking water. They studied the “drinking water microbiome” in a treatment …
There will be a session entitled “The Great Indoors: Recent Advances In the Ecology of Built Environments”, at ESA 2012. This session is organized by Tom Bruns (BIMERC) and Brendan Bohannen (BioBE Center).
One of the difficulties working within the microbiology of the built environment is making sure that the relevant information crosses over the boundaries between building science and microbial ecology since those two groups tend to attend different meeting and read different journals. That’s one of the reasons that we’ve worked to hard to sponsor microbiology …