There is an excellent collection of tools and protocols for various microbiome analyses (genomics, metagenomics, rRNA) available at the Human Microbiome Project DACC site. This includes downloadable tools, links to online web servers, and PDFs of various protocols. Definitely worth checking out if you need some tools for sequence analysis.
The New York Times from yesterday has an editorial discussing hospital acquired infections: Hospitals Shouldn’t Make You Sicker – NYTimes.com. They discuss some new studies in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as some efforts by the Obama Administration. While there is a lot of research on hospital acquired infections, one thing the Times …
Well, we posted about this story before – Legionella bacteria popped up at a party at the playboy mansion in February. And now apparently the source of the Legionella bacteria has been traced to … hot tubs (see Playboy Mansion illness traced to hot tub bacteria – Yahoo! News). Also of note – the epidemiologists used …
For those interested in anything to do with microbiology of the built environment, we have created a citeulike group on this topic. If you are not familiar with citeulike, it is in essence a social reference management system where people can share and organize references (and even papers on top of the references in some …
Just a quick reminder. The 12th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate will take place June 5-10 in Austin, TX. It looks to be very good. MicroBEnet is working with the organizers to plan a few sessions on “Microbiology of the Built Environment”. Stay tuned for more details. Until then, check out the …
A future meeting worth checking out for those interesting in microbiology of the built environment: Bioaerosol.org. Help September 6-9 2011 in Saratoga Springs NY. It is the “6th International Scientific Conference on Bioaerosols, Fungi, Bacteria, Mycotoxins in Indoor and Outdoor Environments and Human Health.” Among the areas of focus will be Natural disaster, flooding, water …
For more information on the meeting see here: Home : Microbiota and mucosal immunology: the interface in health and disease. It looks to be interesting covering a variety of topics of relevance to the human microbiome and also likely relevant to the built environment.
Interesting blog post and paper from Tara Smith. Her lab did some characterization of samples from kids and workers in childcare settings. As part of their work they found some interesting varieties of Staphylococcus aureus. For more detail see her post here: New paper: Staphylococcus aureus ST398 in a childcare worker : Aetiology. If you have …
Richard Branson is planning a deep sea exploration project that will include sampling of microbial diversity with Katrina Edwards and Doug Bartlett and others. For more information see here: Richard Branson launches Virgin Oceanic: deep-sea exploring submarines – Boing Boing. Perhaps we can convince him to also use his planes and spaceships to sample airborn …
Fascinating little story on PHYSORG about Christopher House wanting to survey microbes in water heaters as a way of studying indoor extremophiles. Definitely worth a look and I may be sending in some samples. See Thermophiles lurking in your basement.