For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …
Just got done looking at this paper which I found by searching Google Scholar for “indoor bacteria”. PLOS ONE: 16S rRNA Amplicon Sequencing Demonstrates that Indoor-Reared Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) Harbor a Core Subset of Bacteria Normally Associated with the Wild Host A MiSeq multiplexed 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the gut microbiota of wild and indoor-reared …
California may be in drought, but the ideas keep flowing about different ways to conserve water in green buildings. Only recently have scientists began to truly understand how these obvious benefits to the environment may be adversely affecting human health. In a paper published in Environmental Science Water Research & Technology, researchers have aimed to …
So our first attempt at entering the world of bacterial taxonomy and the description of a new species came out today with the thrilling title of “Porphyrobacter mercurialis sp. nov., isolated from a stadium seat and emended description of the genus Porphyrobacter“. The story leading to this paper took us into a lot of new …
Gearing up the UNITE database for the built mycobiome The team behind the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi has been granted support from the Sloan Foundation to strengthen the support for fungi from the built environment. Launched in 2001 as an ITS database for identification of ectomycorrhizal fungi in the Nordic countries, UNITE …
We expect people next door to be good citizens and would like to meet them before moving in. When it comes to the neighbors living in our tap water, precaution is especially in order. In the “Microbial Neighbors in your Tap Water” series, our PLoS ONE paper released today introduces these invisible neighbors- the building …
Apologies for the late notice on this .. but this may be of interest. Got this announcement a few days ago: Colleagues — Preceding this January’s EMBO Symposium on Aquatic Microeukaryotes in Heidelberg (January 26—29, 2016), the Marine Microbiology Initiative (MMI) is sponsoring a small two-day Summit for up to 24 postdoctoral fellows and advanced graduate …
Just got sent this by Katherine Bowman from the Board on Life Sciences. This is really important and if you know of someone who would be good please consider nominating them. Request for Committee Nominations — Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are …
(This is a guest post by Jordan Peccia at Yale University) After a six-month period of home recruitment, surface and aerosol sampling campaigns have begun in an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indoor microbiome sponsored project awarded to Tulsa and Yale Universities. The goal of this proposed research is to explore how two central and modifiable …
So – I thought some people here would be interested in this. As someone who has been involved in the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in “Microbiology of the Built Environment” for many years, I have been trying to get more involved with the built environment crowd. And I have not always been exceptionally successful …