Microbiome studies involving sports, especially non-contact sports, have yet to become a focus of basic or clinical research. Studying indoor track facilities and the athletes that use them has the potential to demonstrate human effects on the microbiome of a built environment and reciprocated effects of the built environment on the human microbiome; this using …
Harper Adams University in the UK recently posted a news article describing some intriguing work being done by Senior Lecturer Frank Vriesekoop, who has been investigating, among a slew of other interesting topics, whether banknotes can transfer bacteria, including pathogens. The original paper (unfortunately, not Open Access) in which his work was reported can be found here. …
Just a quick note to save the date for the 4th annual Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder. This year it will be held on July 15-18, so as to be right before Healthy Building America 2015, being held also in Boulder (July 19-22). Further details will be found on the conference website, …
Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, so it is critical that we characterize exposure routes of infectious agents, including those resistant to antibiotics. The source of infectious agents is often attributed to the environment. But, few studies have explored what types of environmental exposure introduce opportunistic microbial pathogens or what actions may …
This is just a quick post to introduce some early work products resulting from a really exciting project my team has been working on: the Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) Project (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The goal of OSBSS is to to design and develop a network of inexpensive, open source devices based on …
The Knight lab has been working hard testing new primers for 16S rRNA amplicon production and its time to share our progress. So far, the 16S rRNA V4 region forward primer (designated 515f) has been paired with five different reverse primers (806r, 926r, 967r, 1048r, and 1391r) to amplify ribosomal RNA from bacteria, Archaea, and …
The idea for GenomePeek began two years ago when I was working with Karl Klose, Liz Dinsdale, and Rob Edwards to assemble a P. salmonis genome that was being particularly difficult, even though we had 9 gigabases of sequencing. To check whether it was a single isolated genome I pulled out all the 16S reads …
The Sloan Foundation has recently announced their 2014 Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellows. The awards, along with the titles of the projects are below. Congrats all! Look forward to detailed blog posts from all the awardees describing their upcoming projects. Huan Gu at Syracuse, along with Dacheng Ran. “Understanding and controlling biofilms …
As a biologist with a 3D printer, one of the questions I get most often about 3D printed parts is, “Can you autoclave these things?” As it turns out, no, not really. There are only a handful of thermoplastics that can survive the autoclave process, and most of them are not very good for 3D …
Bill Walsh of The Healthy Building Network has posted a story on the subject,”the Dirt on Antimicrobials” that covers the health effects concerns from the chemicals themselves but does not address the currently popular subject of the health harm or benefits from the presence of and exposures to the multitude of microbes in, on, and …