When I think of things that problematically attach themselves the bottom of boats, I usually think of barnacles. But bacterial biofilms can also be a problem, and can make the substrate more attractive to larger organisms. I saw an interesting story today on work focused on developing anti-fouling systems that aren’t toxic to the environment. …
We should have a recurring series on overblown stories about the microbiology of the built environment, particularly on findings that “X” common item harbors bacteria that might kill you. So far in this vein we’ve discussed dishwashers, money, fast-food playgrounds, hospital curtains, HVAC systems, hospital scrubs, and pillows. Some of these are good stories, but …
Every time we see Norm Pace we get reminded that the “built environment” doesn’t just include buildings. In particular, he points out there isn’t a lot of attention paid to the massive, understudied, and deteriorating water infrastructure in the U.S. Today I saw an interesting article about the survival of norovirus in groundwater. Norovirus is …
When I first heard about the 5-story biowall at Drexel University I was impressed. I’d often heard that plants help clean indoor air and it seemed that having a large experimental setup like this would be great. Just to briefly summarize, this wall features 12 kinds of plants, all growing hydroponically on a giant mesh. …
Viruses often tend to be overlooked in microbiological surveys of the built environment. This is because they don’t show up in either culture-based methods (which are specific to bacteria or fungi) or the commonly employed newer technique of ribosomal RNA sequencing (because viruses don’t have ribosomes). Even in metagenomic analyses where viral sequences are present …
This story isn’t so much about the microbiology of the built environment… it’s more about the effect of the built environment on microbiology. A group of researchers from various institutions recently examined the effects of new road construction on the dispersal of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (E. coli in this case). While perhaps not surprising that the …
We’ve posted recently about studies looking at what microbes are present on the scrubs worn by medical professionals and the fact that those are often worn outside the hospital. Not surprisingly many parts of hospitals themselves harbor a range of microbes, some of which are potentially problematic. A recent study looked at what kinds of …
Wow this “story” (which is really an ad) is just so incredibly bad I do not know what to say: Dangerous Bacteria Isolated in Healthcare HVAC Evaporator Coils. I do not even know where to begin with criticism so I will just go step by step through some of the advertisement. 1. Title: Dangerous Bacteria Isolated …
I’ve posted several times in the past about various beneficial uses of bacteria in the built environment, including remediation of art and the idea of probiotics for buildings. Today I saw a story about using beneficial bacteria in cleaning liquid, which supposedly “reduced bad bacteria by 1,000-fold compared with standard cleaning techniques”. Sounds interesting. Where …
Our reference collection of papers on the microbiology of the built environment has a few papers on microbes and art. Microbes have both destructive potential and restorative applications, mostly in regard to frescoes and paintings. However we haven’t talked much about using microbes as art, within the built environment. I had to post this story …