New Sloan-funded program in microbiology of the built environment: Greg Caporaso, office surface microbiomes across climates

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 …

New Sloan-funded program in microbiology of the built environment: Amy Pruden, Plumbing Microbiome

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 …

Mold risks associated with marijuana grow operations

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 …

Fungi, Bacteria, and ArcheaArchaea on “clean” hardware destined for Mars

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 …

Talks of interest from the upcoming AAAR meeting in October (Minneapolis) – Karen Dannemiller, Denina Hospodsky

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 …

Upcoming talks related to the microbiology of the built environment

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 …