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 …
This is really fascinating: Source: Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft Hat tip to Elisabeth Bik for posting about this on Twitter So cool: microbes actually feed on the cleaning products. Also cool: undergraduates as authors. Team discover how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft https://t.co/ox4kMawHko — Elisabeth Bik (@MicrobiomDigest) June …
So I’d heard about “self-healing” concrete using chemicals that react with water to seal cracks, I’ve even blogged about self-healing concrete using bacteria embedded into the concrete (back in 2011). And then yesterday I came across research talking about using fungi for this purpose. Regardless of which method ends up working, I think these are …
The story behind: Toward the Drug Factory Microbiome: Microbial Community Variations in Antibiotic-Producing Clean Rooms (OMICS. 2018 Feb;22(2):133-144. doi: 10.1089/omi.2017.0091.) PMID: 28873001 [Preprint] It was in 2013, on my return to Cairo University after a couple of years as a visiting scientist at UCSD, that I met Amal for the first time. Amal was a fresh master’s …
New paper of interest:: Genomic Analysis of Hospital Plumbing Reveals Diverse Reservoir of Bacterial Plasmids Conferring Carbapenem Resistance Weingarten RA, Johnson RC, Conlan S, Ramsburg AM, Dekker JP, Lau AF, Khil P, Odom RT, Deming C, Park M, Thomas PJ, NISC Comparative Sequencing Program, Henderson DK, Palmore TN, Segre JA, Frank KM. 2018. Genomic analysis …
This Friday, March 16th at 1:00pm (EDT), the folks over at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will be participating in a reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the Microbiology of the Built Environment. The featured experts are Diane Gold, Vivian Loftness, and Jordan Peccia. All three were committee members on the NAS group that …
Well this certainly caught my attention. A friend and colleague Tara Smith posted this link to Facebook: Sutter Medical Center cut pneumonia by 70%. The key? 50,000 toothbrushes. | Advisory Board Daily Briefing So I went to the site and found some very interesting details including: Pneumonia typically is contracted from germs that enter the body …
This is a very short clip answering the question about use of a spray-probiotic after a hurricane to possibly prevent rot. This was recorded at the MoBE 2017 symposium in Washington D.C. If you’re interested, check out all of the other speakers from MoBE 2017 on our YouTube channel!
Betsy Pugel speaks about tiny houses: planetary protection-focused materials selection for spaceflight hardware surfaces. This was recorded at the MoBE 2017 symposium in Washington D.C. If you’re interested, check out all of the other speakers from MoBE 2017 on our YouTube channel!
Of potential interest – new paper from the Banfield Lab – thanks to Elisabeth Bik for pointing me to this on Twitter. Preterm infants exhibit different microbiome colonization patterns relative to full-term infants, and it is speculated that the hospital room environment may contribute to infant microbiome development. Here, we present a genome-resolved metagenomic …