Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth

“Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth” Indoor Air journal, accepted for publication Abstract Green building materials are becoming more popular. However, little is known about their ability to support or limit microbial growth. The growth of fungi was evaluated on five building materials. Two green, two conventional building materials and wood …

When Law follows Science: Supreme Court unanimously confirms recent study of bacteria on cell phones

  Well, who would have thought.  Just yesterday a paper came out from the BioBE Center on how the microbes on cell phones reflect the microbiome of the person using the phone (Meadow JF, Altrichter AE, Green JL. (2014) Mobile phones carry the personal microbiome of their owners. PeerJ 2:e447).  In the paper they comment …

Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community in the Online Sphere

The Microbiology of the Built Environment Network (http://microBE.net – this website) has made it into the community page at PLoS Biology! Our article has been in the works for some time, and we’re now pleased to announce its official publication: Bik HM, Coil DA, Eisen JA (2014) microBEnet: Lessons Learned from Building an Interdisciplinary Scientific Community …

A primer on detecting indoor bioaerosols

One of the issues that was raised in the recent Microbiology of the Built Environment conference in Boulder was sampling, specifically what and how is the material collected for subsequent biological analysis. Industrial hygienists and those tackling questions of exposure have devoted a lot of time to developing methods for how to study the indoor …

Understanding recent advances in the MoBE field

Shared post by Rachel Adams & James Meadow As intrepid scientists working to understand the interactions between humans, buildings, and the microbes we share, a recently published review paper caught our attention. The piece, Recent Advances in the Microbiology of the Built Environment, by Konya and Scott, set out to synthesize what has been learned …

Important paper on variation in bacterial communities on hands

There is an interesting and important paper out in Microbiology: Hand Bacterial Communities Vary Across Two Different Human Populations by Denina Hospodsky, Amy J. Pickering, Timothy R. Julian , Dana Miller, Sisira Gorthala, Alexandria B. Boehm, and Jordan Peccia.  This paper is important for many reasons including the following: They found significant variation in the communities found on …

Hopistal microbial ecology makes cover of “Medical Science” journal though figure from another paper

OK so I know nothing about this journal Medical Science | Journal. But the cover of their May issue is a figure from a a paper on hospital microbial ecology.  The article is Deepa S, Abishek MU, Venkatesha D. The air as harbinger of infections in critical care units. Medical Science, 2014, 8(28), 8-13).  Here …

Paper says: To all microbiologists everywhere – deposit your strains in public collections – I agree

This is a very very important paper for all people who culture strains of microbes as part of their work: SpringerPlus | Abstract | Deposit of microbial strains in public service collections as part of the publication process to underpin good practice in science. Abstract: Despite recommendations to release microbial resources to the community post-publication, the …

The antibiotics that could kill you

“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …