Whenever I got sick as a young child, my mom insisted upon opening my windows in the mornings to let fresh air in. She claimed it would help me get better if we let clean air in to flush out the dirty air. To me, it was a nuisance. I had the chills and resented …
Quick post here. Just got alerted to this paper by automated searches from Pubchase: Construction of a dairy microbial genome catalog opens new perspect… – PubMed – NCBI. This paper provides a really good example of how researchers interested in microbial ecology of a particular system (in this case, dairies and cheese) can use culturing and …
The environmental engineering research community now recognizes that it is important to understand the bacterial ecology of premise (building) plumbing systems to control opportunistic pathogens (OP). Many investigations, including those supported by the Sloan Foundation MoBE program, have begun to shed light on the factors driving bacterial ecology in drinking water systems. While the bacterial …
For those folks who spend most of our time looking at code, charts and graphs, it’s always fun to look at what folks are doing with imaging and microscopy. Advances in sequencing technology have changed the way we think about the microbial world, but the way we see the microbial world is also changing as …
Just a quick reminder that the Abstract Deadline for Healthy Buildings America is January 15th. This conference will take place July 19-22 in Boulder CO… just following the Sloan Microbiology of The Built Environment Conference, also in Boulder from July 15-18. Here’s a description of the Healthy Buildings Conference: Healthy Buildings is a unique forum …
Teixobactin has been getting a lot of press since it’s debut in the most recent publication of Nature. And rightfully so: The authors claim that the mechanisms by which Teixobactin works will make it very hard for resistance development. Surely this discovery couldn’t have come at a better time, in a period where we have …
The University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center has been chosen by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the AIA Foundation, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to be a charter member of the AIA Design & Health Research Consortium. The eleven Consortium members are university-led teams of architecture and public …
In just over a decade, metagenomics has developed into a powerful and productive method in microbiology and microbial ecology. The ability to retrieve and organize bits and pieces of genomic DNA from any natural context has opened a window into the vast universe of uncultivated microbes. Tremendous progress has been made in computational approaches to …
Just a quick post here to highlight an article I was reading over the break, “Inactivation of Norovirus on Dry Copper Alloy Surfaces”. We’ve posted a number of times in the past about the use of copper in the built environment as an antimicrobial (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). It’s a somewhat charged …
After eight years, California’s Proposition 2 goes into effect in 2015. NPR’s Forum did a program on this today. Prop. 2 is the California law to allow egg-laying chickens enough space to stand up, turn around and stretch their legs. Opponents of the law claim that the eggs will get pooped on with the new space guidelines. On the other …