I don’t even remember exactly how it got started. I know that we had a group of undergrads that joined the lab in Fall 2012. Jenna Lang and I were trying to find a project where we could try having undergrads do a 16S study. I’m not sure how aquariums came up, but somebody had …
This is really cool. Or, actually, really hot. A new paper is out from Regina L. Wilpiszeski, Zhidan Zhang, and Christopher H. House at Penn State on their cool (oops again, hot) Citizen Microbiology project on microbes in water heaters. See the paper here Biogeography of thermophiles and predominance of Thermus scotoductus in domestic water heaters | …
A few days ago I posted the first few lines of an adaptation of a poem: The love song of J. Romaine Lettuce: Lettuce go then, E. coli, While evenly spread out your counts are high Make a patient etherized upon a table; Lettuce go, through certain half-soiled sheets, The muttering retweets … I did …
Completely fascinating, and a wee bit terrifying new paper worth a read:: Ecological Analyses of Mycobacteria in Showerhead Biofilms and Their Relevance to Human Health Abstract: Bacteria within the genus Mycobacterium can be abundant in showerheads, and the inhalation of aerosolized mycobacteria while showering has been implicated as a mode of transmission in nontuberculous mycobacterial …
Just got this e-mail regarding an upcoming NASEM Webinar “Microbiome, Wastewater Treatment, and Antibiotic Resistance” on 9/25/18. Here’s the description of the event: In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released the report, Microbiomes of the Built Environment: A Research Agenda for Indoor Microbiology, Human Health, and Buildings. The report highlights the importance …
So yesterday morning, Jonathan Eisen and myself headed down to Antioch, CA to sample a pilot wastewater treatment facility. In a couple of hours I went from knowing literally nothing about the process to having some handle on at least the latter stages. Pretty cool microbiology. As I understand the problem at hand, conventional wastewater …
Hotel pools and spas cause a third of pool-linked disease outbreaks Just a quick one here — From NBC: Here’s what’s in your pool this summer
Just came across this paper today from the University of Illinois, “Drinking water microbiome assembly induced by water stagnation“. Looks like a good study on actual residential tap water systems. Was also happy to see that the press release didn’t dip too much into scare-mongering. Worth a read by folks interested in water systems. Abstract …
I just got pointed to this article today “Ugly Ducklings – the dark side of plastic materials in contact with potable water“, along with the accompanying commentary “About duck, pipes, and microbiomes“. I think this is a fascinating study for a few reasons. Firstly, like probably most parents, I observed and wondered about the biofilms …
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 …