How important is hand-washing outside of a hospital environment?

I recently spent a weekend visiting a friend out of state and quickly came to realize that he rarely washed his hands. Before eating? No. After the gym? No. Even after going to the bathroom…and not just urination. No washing! I was disgusted and could not convince him of the same. How could an educated …

A new, and scary, fungus among us #MoBE #Candida

Fascinating, scary and really important read from Maryn McKenna in Wired: The Strange and Curious Case of the Deadly Superbug Yeast By the normal standards of outbreak, Candida auris signals a mind-bending shift—and it’s forcing researchers draw on some of medicine’s oldest practices to rethink treatment.   The article tells the tale of Candida auris a fungus that …

New #MoBE paper of interest: Exploring temporal patterns of bacterial and fungal DNA accumulation on a ventilation system filter 

This new #OpenAccess paper may be of interest to those out there thinking about microbes in the built environment. : Luhung I, Wu Y, Xu S, Yamamoto N, Wei-Chung Chang V, Nazaroff WW (2018) Exploring temporal patterns of bacterial and fungal DNA accumulation on a ventilation system filter for a Singapore university library. PLoS ONE …

Assistant Professor in Soil Microbiomics

Assistant Professor Position in Soil  Microbiomics with a 75% research, 25% teaching appointment. The Department of Ecosystem Science and Management seeks candidates interested in conducting research to understand the distribution, composition, diversity, and functional impact of microbial communities in soil-plant habitats. We seek individuals with diverse interests in soil microbiomes and in teaching related courses. …

Story Behind the Paper: Radiation Resistant Bacillus spores from Spacecraft Assembly Facilities

(This is a guest blog post, written by Madhan Tirumalai and George Fox, authors of the publication)   Comparative genomics help identify novel genes of radiation resistant spore producing Bacillus sp. from Spacecraft assembly facilities   Madhan R Tirumalai and George E. Fox Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, USA.   The …

Really important and interesting: Large scale experiment probes chemistry inside our homes

News story about the fascinating and important new project on chemistry of the home.  This is being supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in their new Chemistry of the Built Environment program. Dozens of analytical instruments have spent a month observing the chemistry of the air inside a three bed house Source: Large scale …

Postdoc position in plant microbe interactions at DOE-JGI

Posting this email I received from Ester Singer: ———————- Exciting and unique postdoctoral opportunity at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Plant Microbiome Research Project features: Develop a state-of-the-art growth chamber(“EcoPod”) to study plant-microbiome-ecosystem dynamics under conditions relevant to the real world: https://sites.google.com/lbl.gov/ecopods/ Work with a multi-disciplinary team ofengineers, plant biologists, microbial ecologists and soil scientists at …

Guide to MoBE talks and sessions at Indoor Air 2018

So Indoor Air 2018 is fast approaching (June 22-27th) and there are a large number of MoBE-relevant talks on the menu.  The preliminary program for the entire conference can be found here.  Paula Olsiewski from the Sloan Foundation sent us a list this morning of the talks relevant to the Sloan funded microbiology of the …

Post-Doc/Microbial Genomics in Lebanon

(This post was written by, and posted on behalf of, Sima Tokajian at LAU) The Department of Natural Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at the Lebanese American University invites applicants for a post-doctoral fellowship position in the field of Microbial Genomics within a Microbial Pathogenomics team. The department is seeking a highly …

New Release! Infectious Diseases in the Urban Built Environment Proceedings of a Workshop

On June 8, the National Academies Press released a proceedings of a workshop on Urbanization and Slums: Infectious Diseases in the Built Environment, available for free download here. The workshop rapporteurs have prepared this proceedings as a factual summation of the sessions presented by the National Academies’ Forum on Microbial Threats, in collaboration with the Board …