Engineering Buildings to Promote Good Bacteria – More about Jessica Green
Another article about Jessica Green and the work at the Sloan-funded BioBE Center in Oregon. Bonus points for the picture of plush microbes.
Author: David Coil
David Coil is a Project Scientist in the lab of Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis. David works at the intersection between research, education, and outreach in the areas of the microbiology of the built environment, microbial ecology, and bacterial genomics. Twitter
Updated Simple Guides on Microbiology of the Built Environment Topics
Are you a building scientist curious to learn more about molecular techniques for studying microbes? Are you a microbial ecologist hoping to get a bit of background on ribosomal RNA surveys? Then check our our new and improved “Simple Guides”. These are the start of what we hope will be a larger collection of documents …
Microbiology of the Built Environment Mendeley group curated by #microBEnet
As we’ve posted in the past, Mendeley is a great community resource and one that we’re using to create a reference collection of papers relating to the microbiology of the built environment. One of the really useful things about a reference manager like Mendeley is the ability to have tags associated with articles such as …
Jessica Green: Are we filtering the wrong microbes? (TED Talk)
Great TED talk yesterday by Jessica Green who is one of the folks in charge of the BioBE Center, another project funded by the Sloan Foundation Indoor Air Program. Here she talks about the relationship between outdoor air and mechanically vented air in hospitals.
“NIST Finds That Ethanol-Loving Bacteria Accelerate Cracking of Pipeline Steels”
When people hear “microbiology of the built environment” they tend to think first of buildings. But the built environment includes so much more, ranging from transportation (cars/planes/space shuttles) to swimming pools to highway bridges. The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has a test facility where they study biofuels. They recently presented some results …
New study concerning “Indoor mold poses key asthma risk for babies”
The association between moisture/dampness and negative health indicators (e.g. asthma) is quite well documented. This is usually pinned on an unspecified “mold” although in reality the causative agent(s) is unknown. For an excellent and detailed review of this topic see here. A new study came out this week that looked in particular at the …
Slides from Indoor Air 2011 collected on Slideshare
In response to our request for people to upload their presentations from Indoor Air 2011 we’ve received several presentations. These can be found here. If you were a speaker at Indoor Air 2011 and have already uploaded your presentation to Slideshare, please let us know and we’ll add you to the page.
Biofilm-forming bacteria get ride on final space shuttle trip (on purpose)
The last flight of the Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for early July and there’ll be some cool microbes aboard. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus are both biofilm-forming bacteria with serious health consequences, particularly in hospitals. The researchers involved in this project are interested in the effects of microgravity on biofilm formation, and have some preliminary …
Is your pillow trying to kill you as well? More excessive media hype about indoor microbes.
“How your pillow is the perfect breeding ground for gruesome array of pests and diseases”. This headline from the Daily Mail in the UK was one of many yesterday relating to a study presented at the Healthcare Associated Infections 2011 conference in London on Tuesday. As usual, the study didn’t make any actual associations between …
Viruses aid in the construction of more efficient solar cells.
Like the cement-producing bacteria, this falls under the category of “using microbes to construct the built environment.” Projects like these have no bearing on the natural microbial ecology of structures, but still go to show that the relationship between humans, microbes,and the built environment is complex and can take many forms. In this work, researchers …