Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, so it is critical that we characterize exposure routes of infectious agents, including those resistant to antibiotics. The source of infectious agents is often attributed to the environment. But, few studies have explored what types of environmental exposure introduce opportunistic microbial pathogens or what actions may …
This is just a quick post to introduce some early work products resulting from a really exciting project my team has been working on: the Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) Project (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The goal of OSBSS is to to design and develop a network of inexpensive, open source devices based on …
The Sloan Foundation has recently announced their 2014 Microbiology of the Built Environment Postdoctoral Fellows. The awards, along with the titles of the projects are below. Congrats all! Look forward to detailed blog posts from all the awardees describing their upcoming projects. Huan Gu at Syracuse, along with Dacheng Ran. “Understanding and controlling biofilms …
Note – Jonathan Eisen invited Jack Gilbert to write a post about the Earth Microbiome Project especially in light of the recent paper on the topic by Gilbert et al. (see Eisen’s blog post about this paper here). Post by Jack Gilbert submitted by email to Jonathan Eisen. The Earth Microbiome Project started as …
While recent studies of the microbiology of the built environment (MoBE) have greatly increased our understanding of microbial community structure and composition on surfaces and in air within the spaces in which we live and work, most have been driven and led primarily by microbiologists with the building science community playing a supporting role. Perhaps as …
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 …
(update 10:00am, 6-12-14; added a 13th video from UT Austin) (update 10:15am, 6-16-14; new link for the Oregon video since previous version was cropped) Part of the requirement for attendees of the 2014 Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference in Boulder, CO was that each lab submit a 2-minute video describing their research. Amazingly, 12 …
I’ve been remotely following the Sloan MBE meeting discussions (happening in Boulder, CO this week), and yesterday there was a lot of Twitter discussion focused on data visualization tools. How do we make sense of the millions of DNA sequences we generate from microbial ecology projects in the Built Environment? I thought I’d use this opportunity to highlight …
Right now, in Boulder, CO, the Annual Meeting for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment program is happening. More about the program can be found here and here. Alas, I cannot be there this year. But I will be following as much as possible via Twitter. To follow Tweets from the meeting look …
One of the unmet challenges to the Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program is the sharing of the results of the Foundation-funded studies as well as other studies of the indoor and built environment microbiome. At the American Society for Microbiology’s annual conference in Boston last week, I was impressed by Pieter …