AAAS Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium videos available on-line

Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …

Harvard Magazine covers Sloan grantee Curtis Huttenhower’s research: microbes in transportation systems

In November, 2012, Curtis Huttenhower began work (with funding from the Sloan Foundation) to examine the transmission of human-associated microbes by public transportation surfaces. An article on “Big Data” in the current issue of Harvard Magazine includes a description of Huttenhower’s work in the lead article “Why “Big Data” Is a Big Deal.” After very …

Storify of Tweets, Background, Videos from #AAASMoBE meeting on Microbiomes of the Built Environment

Just a quick post here. The AAAS Meeting on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment” that was sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was on Thursday. I have made a “Storification” of the Tweets, Background and Videos from the meeting. I have embedded the Storify below. It can also be accessed directly here. We will be …

Who are the microbes in your neighborhood? And some background for #AAASMoBe Symposium

Tomorrow all day there will be a meeting at AAAS HQ on “Microbiomes of the Built Environment“.  I will be speaking at the meeting, and this is one of my major research areas, so I am a bit biased, but the meeting is going to be great I think.  And it will be webcast live. …

Cutting-edge technology for “sniffing” microbial volatiles coming to BIMERC as part of Sloan grant renewal

Posting a note from my [gleeful] chemistry colleagues Allen Goldstein and Pawel Misztal about the new instrument that is headed our way.  BIMERC will soon receive an exceptionally unique and powerful Proton Transfer Reaction Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS 8000) for instantaneous detection of a full range gas-phase organics including microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOC). There …

Sloan grant renewed for BIMERC

We got the great news that the Sloan Foundation has funded the proposal to continue the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Ecology Research Consortium. BIMERC is a collaboration of UC Berkeley scientists with a goal “to understand the microbial ecology of the build environment through interdisciplinary research that combines microbial biology, particle transport physics, chemistry, and architecture.” …

Bacteria in a university housing complex

You could say that I’m milking this one study design – one in which we surveyed the airborne microbial communities and surfaces around different units of a university housing complex – and you’d be right. But for good reason: it’s a powerful study design. We have replication of residential units of a common design across …

Lessons learned: The microbes all around us and our buildings — and Jessica Green’s Nautilus article

Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …