When a recently published paper entitled “Microbial Sequencing Analyses Suggest the Presence of a Fecal Veneer on Indoor Climbing Wall Holds” showed up in my NCBI digest, I got excited. However, my excitement died a little when I actually read the paper. Most importantly, the title is slightly deceptive, as only 9% of all reads …
Ah, the antibiotic resistance problem again. Yes, we know that antibiotic overuse-both in humans and in agriculture, contributes. This is not surprising. But how does our built environment contribute to the spread of antibiotic resistance genes? The built environment is a perfect place for host and environmental microbes to collide and share gene, including antibiotic …
We are all quite familiar with the age-old problem: many times, the diagnosis of the microbial agent responsible for an infection takes days. In the best of cases, a broad spectrum antibiotic is prescribed while doctors await lab results, which contributes to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. In the worst cases, the patient does …
Today a colleague sent me a link to a Genome Biology paper entitled “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists.” At first glance, it reminded me of Greg Caporaso’s post about Twitter last month. But as I continued to read, the slight truth behind the premise described in the paper fascinated, …
If you’ve been reading our posts, you are quite familiar with our efforts at characterizing the bacterial and fungal communities of the built environment. We’ve described our study design, experimental protocols, and results. One thing we may have left you wondering about, however, is the nuts and bolts behind the analyses we and other MoBe …
I’ve been thinking a lot about concrete lately. Mainly, I’ve been thinking about the lack of concrete here in Boulder compared to Houston, where I lived for four years until May this year. As I’m training for a half-marathon, my knees are particularly grateful for the lack of concrete they’ve experienced of late. We’ve also …
In 2011, David Coil posted about one of our most utilized mobile built environments-the cars we drive every day (or maybe not, if we adhere to an environmentally friendly lifestyle). A small study had just come out, in which the authors had attempted to identify the bacteria and molds present in cars in different climates. As …