Journal Club: Factors Influencing Early Life Gut Microbial Communities

A new paper by Levin, A. et al was published open access in Scientific Reports entitled, “Joint effects of pregnancy, sociocultural, and environmental factors on early life gut microbiome structure and diversity.” The paper confirmed a lot of what we already now about what factors influence infant gut microbiomes (ex. breastfeeding, mode of delivery, pets, …

New papers on Microbiology of the Built Environment, August 27, 2016

Microbes found in ambulances Not surprisingly, bacteria could be detected after swabbing surfaces in ambulances. Detection and characterization of surface microbial contamination in emergency ambulances – Aketza Varona-Barquin – American Journal of Infection Control ($35.95) A cross-sectional study was performed in 10 emergency basic life support ambulances operating in Bilbao, Spain, to assess surface bacterial …

STAMPS course at MBL

A few weeks ago I attended a course entitled “Strategies and Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Population Structure” at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, along with a number of other students, postdocs and faculty engaged in the study of the microbiology of the built environment (as well as the oceans, humans, animals, plants). This excellent …

Travel Grant for Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application meeting

Travel Grant Opportunity – Attend Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application October 17-18, 2016 in Irvine, California The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are conducting a study on the formation and function of microbial communities in built environments and implications of this knowledge for building design and operations to impact sustainability …

“Bacteria found in infants has also been found in pipes of Maryland hospital”

Just a short post about a news story recently where they have traced Pseudomonas found in NICU infants to the pipes in the building.  It’s still in the early stages of the investigation… but it makes me wonder why routine surveillance isn’t more common.  I feel like we often hear stories about finding Legionella, Pseudomonas, …

Faculty position in Food Microbiology at UC Davis

The Department of Food Science & Technology in the Robert Mondavi Institute of Wine and Food Sciences at UC Davis has an open Assistant Professor faculty position in the area of food microbiology focused on genetics/genomics/metagenomics/ecology of foodborne pathogens. Please note that no prior experience in Food Science is required and we encourage any candidate …

Wish I were going: ISME-International Society for Microbial Ecology – Aug 21-26 #ISME16

Sadly I am not able to go to this this year but it looks really good.  21-26 August 2016 | ISME-International Society for Microbial Ecology. Lots of great sessions and speakers.  Follow along via Twitter hashtag #ISME16. #ISME16 Tweets !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);