Microbes indoors Effects of Microbial Aerosol in Poultry House on Meat Ducks’ Immune Function – Guanliu Yu – Frontiers in Microbiology (OA) The aim of this study was to evaluate effects of microbial aerosols on immune function of ducks and shed light on the establishment of microbial aerosol concentration standards for poultry. A total of 1800 …
The past few days I have been attending a workshop by Erin Dolan of the CURES program (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience) at Santa Rosa Junior College. More than ever, courses are transitioning from the traditional lectureship structure to a hands-on interactive research approach. We came into the workshop with a course already in mind, and used …
Members of the QIIME development group, led by Greg Caporaso and Antonio Gonzalez, will teach a two-day workshop on bioinformatics tools for microbial ecology. The workshop will include lectures covering basic QIIME usage and theory, and hands-on work with QIIME to perform microbiome analysis from raw sequence data through publication-quality statistics and visualizations. The workshop …
The Flint Water Crisis garnered national and international media coverage of elevated levels of lead in the water delivered to consumers’ taps. When the city of Flint began using the Flint River as its drinking water source without the addition of a corrosion inhibitor beginning in April 2014, the corrosive new water began to leach …
Microbes on shoes Review: Shoe soles as a potential vector for pathogen transmission: A systematic review – Tasnuva Rashid – Journal of Applied Microbiology (OA) Shoe soles are possible vectors for infectious diseases. Although studies have been performed to assess the prevalence of infectious pathogens on shoe soles and decontamination techniques, no systematic review has …
A recent open access paper from the BioBE Center at University of Oregon explored the differences between airborne bacteria collected in parks and parking lots. Entitled “Urban greenness influences airborne bacterial community composition” and published in Science of the Total Environment, this interdisciplinary study combined research methods from microbiology and landscape architecture to answer the …
Who wants a new project? Seems like they could use some microbiology of the built environment experts to provide additional help on this one: Officials fret as fungi, algae and bacteria leave growing stains on hallowed stone. Source: A grimy, black biofilm is starting to cover the Jefferson Memorial, and it can’t be killed – …
This recently published closed access paper by Sancheza, et al claims that levels of antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotic resistant bacteria are higher in outdoor air samples downwind of conventional cattle farms compared to organic cattle farms as shown with 3 different methods. This comes as little surprise, as it wasn’t until December 2013 that the …
New research findings have provided helpful conclusions to help you become a more conscientious consumer of eggs. As summarized in this news article, findings related to animal health, consumer health, worker health, environmental impact, and affordability are outlined. The three housing types they looked at were battery cages, enriched colony housing (arguably more humane than …
Definitely worth checking this out. NIST is running a meeting on Standards for Microbiome Measurements From the site: This workshop will seek input on defining reference materials, reference data and reference methods for human microbiome community measurements. This workshop is sponsored by NIST and NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Human Microbiome …