(Announcement for the 2013 Genomic Standards Consortium, you can also check out their wiki) The GSC 15 Workshop The 15th Workshop of the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) Date: April 22-24, 2013 Location: National Institute of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA GSC 15, ‘Science enabled by Standards’, will be held on April 22-24, 2013 at the National …
My last post was about mummy burial sites, so now let’s talk about nuclear waste repositories. There are so many kinds of built environments to chase microbes in. This report is about some microbiology being done in a deep geological repository that is a model site for nuclear waste storage. The work seems mostly culture-based, …
“Built environment” may be a stretch here but I thought this was pretty cool anyway. Some researchers dug up a trio of 500-year old Incan mummies on top on a volcano that were remarkably well-preserved. This intrigued microbiologists who sampled the site and found a surprisingly low diversity of organisms present.
I just have to post about this, even though I can find no verification whatsoever for this story. I think the concept of probiotics for buildings is a useful thought exercise, and have posted about it in the past. I’m also aware that since we don’t have anything close to a reasonable understanding of microbial …
Over the last few months we’ve acquired a few “draft” blog posts on various news items that never seemed to develop into full-fledged blog posts. Rather than let them suffer in silence, I thought I’d post them as a compilation: A story about finding low levels of MRSA in Chicago-area ambulances. Instead of the usual …
Beyond recent posts about Legionella, we don’t talk a lot about the built environment of municipal water systems, although Norm Pace and his group at CU Boulder have done extensive work on the topic in recent years. Therefore I thought I’d better point to this study, published a couple of weeks ago in Environmental Health …
(This is a guest post by David Thaler, who is one of the Sloan-funded investigators working on the microbiology of the built environment. The goal is to spark substantive discussion, so please comment below!) A few thoughts after the Inaugural meeting of Microbiology of the Built Environment Boulder My own opinions on these points are …
As a microbiologist learning a little bit about building science, I was fascinated to hear early on about how little was actually known about the causative effect of particular microbes on human health in the built environment. I had assumed that we knew a lot about which species of fungi (mold) and bacteria caused problems …
Part of our ongoing mission is to get people to look beyond pathogens, to consider the microbiome as a whole (indoors or human), and to not assume all microbes are evil. I was particularly struck yesterday by an article on a “water-less shower” product being hyped on SmartPlanet. Especially this quote: “Though some of you …
Very useful review paper came out this week discussing the microbiology of asthma. Thanks to David Thaler for pointing this one out. The review discusses the role of microbes in both the development and prevention of asthma. While not explicitly concerned with the built environment, the “hygiene hypothesis” has obvious implications for the indoor microbiome.