MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship: Indoor aerosol fate, transport, and control: implications for disease transmission

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 …

MoBE Postdoctoral Fellowship: Microbial activity in house dust and interactions with phthalate esters

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. …

Progress Report on Undergraduate Aquarium Biogeography Project

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 …

Probiotics for Plumbing?

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 …

How biomass can bias high-throughput surveys of microbial communities

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 …

Another reference genome for microbiology of the built environment studies: Curtobacterium flaccumfaciens

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 …

Woohoo – two more genome announcement papers from our undergraduate project on built environment reference genomes

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 …