Another SIGS meeting report of interest: Meeting Report: Fungal ITS Workshop (October 2012) | Bates | Standards in Genomic Sciences. This one discusses issues in sampling and characterizing fungi using ITS sequencing.
A new meeting report is out in the SIGS journal: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 1st Hospital Microbiome Project Workshop on sampling design and building science measurements, Chicago, USA, June 7th-8th 2012. | Smith | Standards in Genomic Sciences. The report discusses a meeting involving many interested in microbiology of the built environment …
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 …
This article, about “Moving the Office Outside” talks about the energy savings and psychological benefits of creating outdoor office spaces. Sadly microbes don’t get a mention, even though there’s an ever-growing body of work showing that indoor air is less healthy than outdoor air (both in terms of chemical composition and microbial makeup).
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).
At microBEnet we’ve had a long standing interest in citizen science in microbiology (and are finally doing some ourselves). If you’re interested in the idea of citizen science, check out this webinar on how to recruit citizens scientists.
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 …
Nice study by Norm Pace’s group looking at microbes present in the air in New York City subway systems. They didn’t find any organisms of public health concern, and showed that the ventilation and mixing of outside air appear to work well. This work does provide an important baseline of data for evaluating the effects …
Worth checking out this workshop summary entitled “The Science and Applications of Microbial Genomics” A couple of chapters in there from Sloan-funded projects in the microbiology of the built environment. $79 for the book but the PDF is free.
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 …