As we have ben writing about here, we are planning to do some microbial sampling of the International Space Station as part of our Project MERCURRI. Thus I read with great interest the following headline this morning: ISS Supply Ship Opens Hatch After ‘Bacteria’ Delay | World | RIA Novosti. Uh oh. Seems that some mold …
Microtiter plate readers are often used for measuring optical density in liquid media, and this is what we were planning to do. However, they are general purpose, programmable instruments, and there’s no rule that says you have to use them this way. It occurred to me that all of our problems stemmed from the difficulties …
Here is a conundrum: Suppose you want to measure growth rates of bacterial cultures in an aerobic environment, on LB, in 96-well plate format. So, you buy some plates from your favorite supplier, dispense some LB into the wells with a multichannel pipetter, inoculate from whatever your source is, and pop it into your plate …
Of possible interest to studies of microbiology of the built environment is a new paper: PLOS Pathogens: Asthma and the Diversity of Fungal Spores in Air. By Anne Pringle from Harvard University, the goal is summed up pretty well by the author With this primer, my aim is to facilitate communication by providing doctors with a …
Just wrote a post a few minutes ago about the sequencing and analysis of the genome(s) of representatives of the TM6 phylum of bacteria that were found in a hospital sink biofilm: First genome of TM6 — a novel phylum of bacteria — determined from a hospital sink sample. And lo and behold just realized there …
Interesting new paper out from the J. Craig Venter Institute. The paper is in PNAS: Candidate phylum TM6 genome recovered from a hospital sink biofilm provides genomic insights into this uncultivated phylum. Thankfully it was published under the PNAS Open Access option so anyone / everyone has access to the paper. In the paper the authors …
On Fresh Air w/ Terry Gross yesterday there was a discussion of a book about air travel: Flying High And Low In ‘Full Upright And Locked Position’ | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. And one of the topics that came up was the germ / microbe content of different parts of a plane. Not sure …
A paper of potential interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd has just been published: Surface Microbes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Changes with Routine Cleaning and Over Time. From Nicholas Bokulich, David Mills and Mark Underwood at UC Davis it focuses on rRNA PCR based characterization of microbes (bacteria and fungi) on …
There is a new paper of interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd: Identification of Household Bacterial Community and Analysis of Species Shared with Human Microbiome. Published June 7 in Current Microbiology by a group from South Korea, it details culture-based and culture-independent (i.e., rRNA PCR) comparisons of the bacteria found on fridges and …
Quick post – there is an interview of Jessica Green posted on SmartPlanet. The interview is with Christina Hernandez Sherwood: Q&A: Jessica Green, biodiversity scientist, on the microbial ecosystems in our buildings | SmartPlanet. The interview focused mostly on microbes in buildings and work at the BioBE Center at U. Oregon. In the interview she …