Quick post – there is an interview of Jessica Green posted on SmartPlanet. The interview is with Christina Hernandez Sherwood: Q&A: Jessica Green, biodiversity scientist, on the microbial ecosystems in our buildings | SmartPlanet. The interview focused mostly on microbes in buildings and work at the BioBE Center at U. Oregon. In the interview she …
Continuing their recent run of articles about microbiology (a summary of such articles can be found on Jonathan’s blog), the NYT just ran another story on the Sloan-funded microbial diversity survey of NY subways. See our previous blog on the topic here.
A great article in the NYT today about the microbiology of the built environment ranging from pillowcases to hospitals to asthma. Includes interviews with Noah Fierer, Rob Dunn, Paula Olsiewski, Jessica Green, Jordan Peccia, and Jack Gilbert. A good link for sending to family and friends that ask “what are you working on again?”
Nice little news story about the Hospital Microbiome project In Nature News: Patients leave a microbial mark on hospitals : Nature News & Comment. The article mentions that Jack Gilbert will be presenting results on this project at the Sloan Foundation meeting on Microbiology of the Built Environment today. Good that I am at that meeting. …
In their just published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, “Tetracycline Resistance and Class 1 Integron Genes Associated with Indoor and Outdoor Aerosols,” Alison L. Ling, Norman R. Pace, Mark T. Hernandez, and Timothy M. LaPara have found that genes escape the indoor environment and can be found 2 km away. The abstract can be …
A story on the May 6th NPR program, Morning Edition, “Parents’ Saliva On Pacifiers Could Ward Off Baby’s Allergies” features a focus on the human microbiome, partental behavior and babies’ allergies. “That word “microbiome” – describing the collection of bacteria that live in and on our bodies – keeps popping up. This time, researchers say …
The Health in Buildings Roundtable will meet Tuesday, April 23rd from 8 to 4:30 at the Natcher Center on the NIH campus in Bethesda. The line-up includes a diverse set of speakers and topics. We saw nothing in the program posted on line mentioning microbial ecology, microbiology, or microbes, but the program might be of …
A nice article in Forbes talking about microbes in general and about Jessica Green’s recent work on visualizations of microbial communities in the built environment (see her TED talk here).
The University of Chicago has just opened a massive new hospital on the university campus. Jack Gilbert is PI on a study of the evolution of the hospital microbiome funded by the Sloan Foundation. The evolution of the microbiomes in a set of hospital rooms is being studied continuously beginning before the hospital accepted the …
Time to push out a bunch of draft blog posts that have been piling up. First up is a new study finding that a large percentage of dental bib clips harbored bacteria even after disinfection. What I liked about this study was that they made a good effort to explain that they didn’t find any …