Microbial pathogens, including viral, bacterial, and fungal species, are transmitted via both airborne and surface contact routes in indoor environments. Breathing, sneezing, and coughing are important sources of many of these species, with the microbes being aerosolized and dispersed in microscopic liquid droplets that may settle to nearby surfaces or evaporate into smaller droplet nuclei …
Are the microbes in our homes alive, or are they dead? If they are alive, what are they doing? We plan to answer these questions during my MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Bacteria in house dust can originate from places such as the outdoors or from the bodies of humans. …
Starting in the fall of 2012 we began a second project to involve undergraduates (and a high school student) in real research that relates to the microbiology of the built environment. This time we looked at biogeography and succession in microbial communities found in aquariums. A description of the project can be found here and …
Hats off to Tuesday’s New York Times article, “A Quest for Even Safer Drinking Water,” for daring to bring microbiology to the people. The article sheds light several key reasons we can no longer afford to ignore the vast microbial diversity that exists within the drinking water environment, among them are opportunistic pathogens and antibiotic …
We’ve recently received an award from the Sloan Foundation to examine the mycobiota from paired house dust and infant fecal samples collected in the first year of life. The main purpose of the study is to examine how the immediate environment (house dust) may shape the gut mycobiota of infants and affect immune activation and …
With the publication of the 6th and last genome paper to come out of our Undergraduate Genome Sequencing Project I thought this would be a good time to reflect on how it all went. To summarize, we had a group of undergraduate students go out into the built environment and attempt to find microbes whose …
Puffballs are a type of fungus that is aptly named. You can ‘puff’ their ball-shaped fruiting bodies, and so many spores come out (a large one can contain 7 million), they make a visible cloud. This ostentatious and satisfying practice makes puffballs a popular choice for novice mushroom hunters tasked with bringing in specimens for …
In my last two posts I described the process of developing the microbial growth experiment we will be running aboard the International Space Station. We’ve tackled growth assays on 96-well plates in zero gravity, at least in theory. How well will this actually work on aboard the space station? To find out, Jenna, Wendy and …
Another genome report from our microBEnet project on generating reference genomes for microbes from the built environment is out: Draft Genome Sequence of Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens Strain UCD-AKU (Phylum Actinobacteria). From the paper: Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens strain UCD-AKU was isolated from a residential carpet in Davis, California, as part of a project to produce reference genomes for microorganisms …
Two new papers out from the microBEnet Undergraduate Research: Built Environment Reference Genomes project: Coil DA, Doctor JI, Lang JM, Darling AE, Eisen JA. 2013. Draft Genome Sequence of Kocuria sp. Strain UCD-OTCP (Phylum Actinobacteria). Genome Announc. 1(3):e00172-13. doi:10.1128/genomeA.00172-13. Diep AL, Lang JM, Darling AE, Eisen JA, Coil DA. 2013. Draft genome sequence of Dietzia sp. strain UCD-THP (phylum …