Every time we see Norm Pace we get reminded that the “built environment” doesn’t just include buildings. In particular, he points out there isn’t a lot of attention paid to the massive, understudied, and deteriorating water infrastructure in the U.S. Today I saw an interesting article about the survival of norovirus in groundwater. Norovirus is …
When I first heard about the 5-story biowall at Drexel University I was impressed. I’d often heard that plants help clean indoor air and it seemed that having a large experimental setup like this would be great. Just to briefly summarize, this wall features 12 kinds of plants, all growing hydroponically on a giant mesh. …
Ever heard any of these “microbial myths”? “Microbes are all bad” “The only good microbe is a dead microbe” “E. coli bacteria (or any other microbe) are all the same” “The biggest health concern in buildings is mold” “Microbes in the built environment affect everyone the same way” Then check out our new microbial myth …
Jessica Green (http://biology.uoregon.edu/people/green/) and Brendan Bohannan(http://biology.uoregon.edu/ceeb/faculty_pages/Bohannan/) are currently seeking a bioinformatics postdoctoral researcher to explore fundamental questions in microbial ecology and evolution. Applicants should have a PhD with extensive training using bioinformatics to understand the ecology and/or evolution of complex biological communities, and strong writing skills. The ideal candidate will have experience developing and applying quantitative community and population ecological …
Viruses often tend to be overlooked in microbiological surveys of the built environment. This is because they don’t show up in either culture-based methods (which are specific to bacteria or fungi) or the commonly employed newer technique of ribosomal RNA sequencing (because viruses don’t have ribosomes). Even in metagenomic analyses where viral sequences are present …
This story isn’t so much about the microbiology of the built environment… it’s more about the effect of the built environment on microbiology. A group of researchers from various institutions recently examined the effects of new road construction on the dispersal of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (E. coli in this case). While perhaps not surprising that the …
Just had a quick glance at this: Designing the Microbial Research Commons: Proceedings of an International Workshop. Hal Levin sent me the link and it certainly seems interesting. I am going to have to peruse it a bit more but it seems of relevance to the microBEnet community so I thought I would post about it. …
We’ve posted recently about studies looking at what microbes are present on the scrubs worn by medical professionals and the fact that those are often worn outside the hospital. Not surprisingly many parts of hospitals themselves harbor a range of microbes, some of which are potentially problematic. A recent study looked at what kinds of …
Wow this “story” (which is really an ad) is just so incredibly bad I do not know what to say: Dangerous Bacteria Isolated in Healthcare HVAC Evaporator Coils. I do not even know where to begin with criticism so I will just go step by step through some of the advertisement. 1. Title: Dangerous Bacteria Isolated …
I’ve posted several times in the past about various beneficial uses of bacteria in the built environment, including remediation of art and the idea of probiotics for buildings. Today I saw a story about using beneficial bacteria in cleaning liquid, which supposedly “reduced bad bacteria by 1,000-fold compared with standard cleaning techniques”. Sounds interesting. Where …