When I first heard about the 5-story biowall at Drexel University I was impressed. I’d often heard that plants help clean indoor air and it seemed that having a large experimental setup like this would be great. Just to briefly summarize, this wall features 12 kinds of plants, all growing hydroponically on a giant mesh. …
Ever heard any of these “microbial myths”? “Microbes are all bad” “The only good microbe is a dead microbe” “E. coli bacteria (or any other microbe) are all the same” “The biggest health concern in buildings is mold” “Microbes in the built environment affect everyone the same way” Then check out our new microbial myth …
Viruses often tend to be overlooked in microbiological surveys of the built environment. This is because they don’t show up in either culture-based methods (which are specific to bacteria or fungi) or the commonly employed newer technique of ribosomal RNA sequencing (because viruses don’t have ribosomes). Even in metagenomic analyses where viral sequences are present …
This story isn’t so much about the microbiology of the built environment… it’s more about the effect of the built environment on microbiology. A group of researchers from various institutions recently examined the effects of new road construction on the dispersal of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (E. coli in this case). While perhaps not surprising that the …
We’ve posted recently about studies looking at what microbes are present on the scrubs worn by medical professionals and the fact that those are often worn outside the hospital. Not surprisingly many parts of hospitals themselves harbor a range of microbes, some of which are potentially problematic. A recent study looked at what kinds of …
I’ve posted several times in the past about various beneficial uses of bacteria in the built environment, including remediation of art and the idea of probiotics for buildings. Today I saw a story about using beneficial bacteria in cleaning liquid, which supposedly “reduced bad bacteria by 1,000-fold compared with standard cleaning techniques”. Sounds interesting. Where …
Year 2030 1: Construct a building 2: Spray bacteria and fungi all around the building 3: Wait a few weeks and then open for business Sound crazy? Not necessarily. This scenario, or something like it, is the kind of application that could theoretically come out of current studies on the microbiology of the built environment. …
Our reference collection of papers on the microbiology of the built environment has a few papers on microbes and art. Microbes have both destructive potential and restorative applications, mostly in regard to frescoes and paintings. However we haven’t talked much about using microbes as art, within the built environment. I had to post this story …
When most people think of the microbiology of the built environment they think of pathogens that hang out in buildings. Here’s a neat story about a helpful bacteria that lives in a very different kind of “built environment”… a uranium mill tailings site. These tailings facilities are where all the waste and excess rock from …
Apparently September is “National Indoor Toxic Mold Awareness Month”. I’m not really sure what this means because virtually every link I found was some variant on “It’s Mold Awareness Month so please buy our product/service”. Which is fine of course but all that I could dig up was that this was started by a group …