Great article about a great study. Read them both. Failing that, here’s my short version: A study entitled “Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics” came out yesterday that is just fascinating on multiple levels. This article describes a large-scale metagenomics study carried out by the PathoMap project at Weill Cornell Medical …
Well, the stories just keep coming about antimicrobial agents we can use to kill off some pathogen in our environment. Today’s is about plasma – yes plasma – and how it can deactivate norovirus in the environment: ‘Cold plasma’ kills off norovirus from the BBC. The article discusses a new study in the journal mBio. Some key …
IBM and Mars put out a joint press release today announcing a new effort to use metagenomics to study microorganisms in the food supply chain. The new initiative, called the Sequencing the Food Supply Chain Consortium (SFSC), will use metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to establish what they call a “microbial baseline” that can later be used …
From the perspective of biothreat detection, one of the biggest questions is “what is the background?”. If you sample the air near a farm, there’s a good bet that you’ll find anthrax (or at least a close relative indistinguishable by a 16S PCR survey). But that’s just because anthrax lives in the soil, not because …
There is an abundance of literature on how microbes can obtain antibiotic resistance, but not as much about how antibiotic resistance can spread. Jonathan drew my attention to this article today, which highlights the fact that antibiotic resistance can be spread through the air. While I didn’t find the conclusions all that surprising, I was …
Nice story worth reading in New York Magazine by Ferris Jabr: Uptown Mice Are Different From Downtown Mice — NYMag. It discusses some work on evolution in urban environments, including a little bit about work starting to be done on gut microbes of rodents and how they might be affected by urban life. Other things of …
Teixobactin has been getting a lot of press since it’s debut in the most recent publication of Nature. And rightfully so: The authors claim that the mechanisms by which Teixobactin works will make it very hard for resistance development. Surely this discovery couldn’t have come at a better time, in a period where we have …
The University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment Center has been chosen by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the AIA Foundation, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to be a charter member of the AIA Design & Health Research Consortium. The eleven Consortium members are university-led teams of architecture and public …
In just over a decade, metagenomics has developed into a powerful and productive method in microbiology and microbial ecology. The ability to retrieve and organize bits and pieces of genomic DNA from any natural context has opened a window into the vast universe of uncultivated microbes. Tremendous progress has been made in computational approaches to …
Just a quick post here to highlight an article I was reading over the break, “Inactivation of Norovirus on Dry Copper Alloy Surfaces”. We’ve posted a number of times in the past about the use of copper in the built environment as an antimicrobial (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here). It’s a somewhat charged …