A while back we posted about our microBEnet project to have undergraduates come into the lab and sequence reference genomes from the built environment. That project now has it’s own blog, being maintained by the students themselves. Comments about our original post led to the following guest post by Paul Orwin, who is doing something …
Just a short post about bacteria literally converting the built environment into the natural environment. There are numerous specialized bacteria currently eating the Titanic, including one called Halomonas titanicae. They’re converting the steel and iron into rust and the whole thing may be gone in a few decades. Bad news for history buffs, good news …
Job posting for a part time, online only research assistant position helping to catalog information from the primary literature relating to the microbial ecology of the built environment. Long description from Hal Levin, the contact person for this position: “We’d like to find a student well along in their academic career (grad student or undergrad …
Looking for input on a couple of new pages on the microBEnet site. The first is a revised, updated list of all the grantees in the Sloan Foundation’s microbiology of the built environment program. This might be useful for anyone considering the recent call for proposals. If you’re a Sloan Grantee, we’d really appreciate it …
We’ve talked here in the past about the idea of probiotics for buildings (which is many years in the future, if ever) and pretty much everyone has heard about probiotics for human health (currently an issue of much debate). One of the problems with both buildings and people is the difficulty of testing a hypothesis …
This study came out online in February and provided a very interesting look into the role of human occupancy in relation to indoor biological aerosols. Most strikingly the authors found that millions of bacteria and fungi are added to the air in an occupied room, mostly through stirring up previously deposited organisms. Yesterday an article …
Another new grant in the microbiology of the built environment program, by Rob Knight at CU Boulder, in collaboration with Robert Van Pelt: Title: “Microbially Visible Home” “The Microbially Visible Home will perform dense spatial and temporal sampling of the ArcheType sustainable house in Toronto, linking microbial data to BIM (Building Information Models) in order …
An official missive from the Sloan Foundation (PDF version here) Dear Colleague − The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has created a new funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment program. The Foundation seeks to support up to four new studies of the microbiology of the built environment. Successful projects will be either hypothesis …
(Text below from the conference organizers. -David) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the University of Colorado are pleased to announce the inaugural conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment, taking place May 31 and June 1, 2012. This is the first event of a conference series that will convene thought leaders across fields …
The Sloan Foundation has made a few new grants as part of their microbiology of built environment program. Here’s a description of the most recent, being undertaken by Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello at the University of Puerto Rico: Title: Microbes of built environments spanning human urbanization “Little attention has been paid to the microbes that live …