Some recent papers and news articles from my daily blog MicrobiomeDigest. Not all are Open Access, but they are worth mentioning here too. Indoor air bacterial communities in Hong Kong households assemble independently of occupant skin microbiomes – David Wilkins – Environmental Microbiology While indoor air and dust are known to also contain many human-associated taxa, household air …
Well, as with some other recent posts here, the paper I am writing about is not open access and I do not have any obvious way to get it at this time. But it looks interesting, and more importantly it shows just how many places are thinking about microbial ecology in built environments. The paper …
Well this certainly seems of interest to the microBEnet audience Ann Med. 2015 Apr 23:1-8. Helsinki alert of biodiversity and health. Alas the paper is an absurd $52 to access for 24 hours. So all I have is the abstract, which certainly seems interesting: Urban living in built environments, combined with the use of processed water …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Doctor! Doctor! – Thompson Twins Despite the many hours we spend inside homes, offices, and other buildings, we still know very little about the microorganisms that live inside these walls. Health-care facilities are very important in this respect, because the humans inside these buildings are often immunocompromised: they are …
There are few constants in this world. One exception, however, is the passing of day to night, which has gone on without fail since life first emerged on Earth. Early life quickly learned to anticipate changes associated with light and dark. This ability to tell time – to peer into the immediate future – was …
There is an interesting and potentially very useful paper just out: Optimized DNA extraction and metagenomic sequencing of airborne microbial communities A brief summary from the journal: This protocol enables collection of airborne particulate matter; and after sample pretreatment, it allows sufficient quantities of microbial DNA to be extracted and prepared for downstream applications such …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Harder To Breathe – Maroon 5 Asthma severity can be affected by several indoor and outdoor conditions, including dust and microbes. In a paper that came out last week in Indoor Air, researchers from Yale University applied NextGen DNA sequencing to characterize the bacterial and fungal communities in house-dust sampled from …
A 2015 paper from Casas et al (unfortunately no longer open access) investigated the effect of bleach on respiratory infections in young school-children. They analyzed information from Spain, the Netherlands, and Finland. Spain had the most instance of bleach use, which corresponded with a higher respiratory and related infections. On the other end of the spectrum, Finland …
There is a new paper out in Frontiers in Microbiology by fungal geneticist Joan Bennett that is fascinating: Frontiers | Silver linings: a personal memoir about Hurricane Katrina and fungal volatile. Here is how it starts: In August 2005 I was about to start a sabbatical leave during which I planned to work on the annotation …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Mat Kearney – Breathe In, Breathe Out This paper came out last month, and I thought it would be nice to briefly mention it here, even though many other papers have looked at the concentrations of airborne bacteria and viruses as well. In this study, done by Aaron Prussin …