New paper out from the microbiology of the built environment community: MIxS-BE: a MIxS extension defining a minimum information standard for sequence data from the built environment. The joint first authors are Elizabeth Glass and Yekaterina Dribinsky. And the senior author is Lynn Schriml. The paper is simple but I think very important – it describes …
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) held a conference last week on the topic “Environmental Health in Low Energy Buildings.” Although you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from the name, the society is a lively, welcoming group of folks from all over the world interested in improving the built environment. At this …
Well – three recent news stories show an increasing awareness and impact of microbes in the built environment on sports, of all things: Grambling State Tigers’ players send letter of complaint to administration – ESPN Third Tampa Bay Buccaneers player tests positive for MRSA staph … A’s have another sewage leak during win over Angels …
Just got the good news that microBEnet will continue to be funded by the Sloan Program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment for the next two years. After three years of attempting to help the field with “curation, communication, collaboration, connection” we have taken this as an opportunity to re-assess our direction and goals. …
Microbial pathogens, including viral, bacterial, and fungal species, are transmitted via both airborne and surface contact routes in indoor environments. Breathing, sneezing, and coughing are important sources of many of these species, with the microbes being aerosolized and dispersed in microscopic liquid droplets that may settle to nearby surfaces or evaporate into smaller droplet nuclei …
Are the microbes in our homes alive, or are they dead? If they are alive, what are they doing? We plan to answer these questions during my MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bacteria in house dust can originate from places such as the outdoors or from the bodies of humans. …
The Sloan Foundation has just announced their 2013 Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellows. The awards, along with the titles of the projects are below. Congrats all! Aaron J. Prussin at Virginia Tech, co-advisors Linsey Marr and Kyle Bibby (Pittsburg) “Bacterial and viral microbiomes of daycare centers” Anne. A. Madden at University of Colorado, …
Sept. 18, 2013. Magill House – I’m in a B&B that was once a cure cottage in the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake, New York, where for more than 70 years tuberculosis patients came from the big city hoping that the cold mountain air would cure their disease. Half the houses had TB patients near …
For those wanting to catch up on some of the cool research that was presented this week at the 32nd Annual Conference of the American Association for Aerosol Research in Portland, I’ve pulled together some of the tweets that were posted during the meeting into a Storify! This year only 4 people were tweeting at …
Completely fascinated by these pictures of abandoned farm houses: Photographer Niki Feijen's eerie images of the abandoned farm houses | Mail Online. . And that got me wondering – what happens to the microbial ecology of a building once it is abandoned. I am not familiar with any studies of this and a few quick …