Last year as part of microBEnet’s mandate to perform outreach associated with the microbiology of the built environment we sponsored and managed an undergraduate research project. In this we isolated organisms from the built environment and then sequenced several reference genomes. This work is currently being prepared in a series of genome announcement publications. (see …
Here are a few of the talks from the built environment session of the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting (previous blog post here). This session was sponsored by microBEnet. James Meadow, from the BioBE Center. Jason Stajich, part of the MoBEDAC project. Susana Remold from the University of Louisville.
Destaillats et al 2011. “Secondary pollutants from ozone reactions with ventilation filters and degradation of filter media additives”, Atmospheric Environment, vol. 45, no. 21, p. 3561-3568, 2011. Can be freely downloaded from LBL.gov web site as LBNL-4829E.pdf (692.59 KB) http://iepubs.lbl.gov/publications/author/22
A paper has been uploaded to the Mendeley group associated with microbe.net, Microbiology of the Built Environment (http://www.mendeley.com/groups/844031/microbiology-of-the-built-environment/). Appropriately, the title of the paper is as accurate as it is concise: “Indoor air purification and decontamination by a new highly-efficient air purification technology with filter sterilization and impact of air exchange rate on bacteria and …
Quick post here about a study that came out last month “Exploring Bacterial Diversity in Hospital Environments by GS-FLX Titanium Pyrosequencing” by Poza et al in Madrid. These authors used 454 sequencing of 16S to survey bacterial populations in the entrance hall and the ICU of a hospital in Madrid. Not surprisingly, they found lower …
Hmm – in this story in the LA Times: Natural swimming ponds – latimes.com there is a discussion of a move towards more “natural” swimming pools using less chlorine. And there is a part of the article of which I am deeply skeptical BioNova pools, as well as those designed locally by Environmental Sculpturing, are biologically active. …
We’ve posted in the past about various Legionella outbreaks including the one in Chicago, the one in Edinborough, and of course the one in the Playboy Mansion. For some reason we didn’t talk about the recent lethal outbreak in Quebec. You can read about it here. The latest update is that the source of Legionella …
An interesting review article from Linsey Marr’s group at Virginia Tech looking at the various factors that might influence virion survival in aerosols. Abstract below: Many airborne viruses have been shown to be sensitive to ambient humidity, yet the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon remain elusive. We review multiple hypotheses, including water activity, surface inactivation, …
Last night was the Microbiology of the Built Environment session at the bi-annual Lake Arrowhead meeting. This session was organized and sponsored by microBEnet. I recorded some of the talks and will post those videos here after some editing. Here’s a summary of the speakers and the topics discussed. The first speaker was James Meadow …
Lots of attention to disease transmission and illness related to air travel lately. A new paper in the journal Indoor Air suggests that if passengers would wear N-95 respirators when they fly, they could significantly reduce their risk of infection. You can read the paper “Risk assessment of airborne infectious diseases in aircraft cabins” at …