A new paper from Van Bonn et al studies the effect of a water change on the bacterial community of an aquarium. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available openly, but it seems pretty cool: The bacterial community composition and structure of water from an established teleost fish system was examined before, during and after a major water change …
A recent publication in Environmental Science & Technology and subsequent review on Phys.org gave a lot of promise for the technology of using microbes to clean up waterways. The study suggested that harnessing microbes is an environmentally sustainable solution to breaking down pollutants in water. I think ‘breakthrough’ is a bit strong of an accolade …
Short post here about a cool-sounding advance in materials science related to microbes in the built environment. A research group at Duke University is working on a material that deforms in response to an electric current, thereby dislodging established biofilms (e.g. on the underside of a boat). Hard to tell how likely this is since …
See this story discussing presentation at conference on EIDs Hospitals at Risk for Waterborne Diseases (Note – this was imported from a beta version of the microBEnet blog that was on Blogger. This was published original on 8/6/2010)