Just a quick link fest here. Lots of buzz going around about various microbiology of the built environment papers. Here are some news stories / blog posts of relevance: Brooke Borel at PopSci: Building Design Influences Bacterial Growth | Popular Science. Me on microBEnet: Studying — not wantonly killing — the microbes around us and the rise …
Imagine you have a camera with a special “anti-macro” lens. This lens scrubs from any image all plants and animals and other “macro” organisms. And this lens also highlights the remaining living things – the microorganisms – anywhere in the frame (including those that were in or on the macro organisms removed from the image). …
Most people who know me call me Bubba. The name you will find on a paper that just came out, is my “official” name, Brandon. However, my first given name is, in fact, Bubba, a moniker I acquired during my brief hospitalization as a premature infant, the very topic of my first first-author paper. Since …
We know that human babies born through vaginal birth are colonized by their mother’s microbes but what about the case of premature infants? A paper published by Jill Banfield and colleagues as part of a Sloan-funded project investigates the connection between microbial communities of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and those of the premature infant gut. Premature infants …
Maria Nunez and Hugo Hammer recently conducted a study of Scandinavian house foundations, with the goal of investigating the microbes that take advantage of the often moist conditions found in below-grade structures. The study identified five below-grade “specialist taxa” that were commonly found across all sample sites and analysed the relative ecological preferences of each. …
Researchers in Italy have found abnormally high levels of infectious microbes in the water from faucets at two hospitals compared to water coming in from the deeper areas of the pipes. One of the reasons is that the water is not meeting the chlorine or temperature requirement needed to eliminate harmful pathogens, such as Acinetobacter …
A recent investigation by the New York Times detailed here looked into water contamination levels of the rooftop water towers installed throughout New York City. The towers became common in the 1800s as buildings became to tall to allow for adequate water pressure. Even today the city’s water mains only provide enough pressure to reach the …
Continuing with blog posts about my class EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity This is the post for Lecture 3 which was the first lecture on what I call “Era I” in DNA sequencing studies of microbes – studies of the Tree of Life. This lecture focused primarily on Woese’s work on the …
I am in the process of teaching a course on “DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity” (EVE 161 at UC Davis) and I thought it would be of use to some people to post about it. I have made a landing page for the course: EVE 161: DNA sequence based studies of microbial diversity This …
So – my microBEnet project has spent a lot of time working on this reference collection that we have currently in Mendeley. Microbiology of the Built Environment | Mendeley Group. In addition to just collecting these 700+ papers we have also added our own tags to the references in regard to the types of environments …