Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Doctor! Doctor! – Thompson Twins Despite the many hours we spend inside homes, offices, and other buildings, we still know very little about the microorganisms that live inside these walls. Health-care facilities are very important in this respect, because the humans inside these buildings are often immunocompromised: they are …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Harder To Breathe – Maroon 5 Asthma severity can be affected by several indoor and outdoor conditions, including dust and microbes. In a paper that came out last week in Indoor Air, researchers from Yale University applied NextGen DNA sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities in house-dust sampled from …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Mat Kearney – Breathe In, Breathe Out This paper came out last month, and I thought it would be nice to briefly mention it here, even though many other papers have looked at the concentrations of airborne bacteria and viruses as well. In this study, done by Aaron Prussin …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Kraftwerk – Radioactivity – Stop Sellafield concert 1992 Cockroaches are often portrayed as the only organism that can survive a nuclear disaster. Indeed, Discovery’s Mythbusters team found that about 10 percent of a group of cockroaches could survive 30 days of exposure to 10,000 radon units of cobalt 60, …
Last week, I came across a paper in PLOS ONE that looked interesting, especially in the light of the recent mBio paper that looked at sewage as a reflection of a city’s human-associated microbiome (also see this recent post on MicroBEnet). In the PLOS ONE paper “The Source of the River as a Nursery for …
In this week’s Best of MicrobiomeDigest, we’ll look at the effect of a “sea voyage” on the human oral and belly button microbiome. For those of you who are not familiar with Fisherman’s Friend (I am not sure if these are as popular in the rest of the world as they are in parts of Europe), it’s a British …
Microbiomes are everywhere. Not only inside and around us, but also in the scientific literature. Not too many years ago, only a handful of microbiology laboratories were analyzing the composition of the invisible communities that surround us. Today, it feels as if every other scientist is doing something microbiome-related. New techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and …