What’s new in the intersection of microbiology and human use of the environment? Here are some recent papers and their abstracts. The first paper is important because it describes the microbiological conditions of the waters that will be used in the 2016 Olympics: Environmental and Sanitary Conditions of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro – Giovana …
As Beijing experiences its first “Red Alert” smog emergency, an aptly-timed bit of quirky performance art is making the round on Chinese social media and the English-language press today. A artist from Shenzhen who calls himself “Brother Nut” spent 100 days walking around Beijing with an industrial vacuum cleaner. He then collected dust into a …
Autumn is not just a beautiful season in which multicolored leaves fall to the ground from their branches. It is also a good time for all kinds of microbes to flourish with the new addition of delicious leaf litter nutrients. A new paper from Irga et al studies the connection between the fungi found on leaf litter and …
Just a quick note that the meeting report from the Sloan-funded symposium “Microbiology of the Built Environment” held at Healthy Buildings Europe 2015 is now available in Microbiome. Summary below: Excess or abnormal microbiological activity is both a cause and a consequence of unhealthful indoor environments. Building research, investigations, and remediation must identify compromised buildings …
As buildings move forward in an attempt to become more “green,” it is important to continue to assess how the microbiology changes with these new systems. A recent study from Keely et al used high-throughput pyrosequencing to look at what microbes live in the different points in grey water systems. The sampling efforts were split into …
Infants born via c-section have a microbiome community composed mostly of skin bacteria [1-3], but the source of these skin bacteria is unknown. People quickly shed bacteria into their environment, leaving their own bacterial signature in a room within hours [4]. Do hospital operating rooms harbor skin bacteria that could colonize c-section delivered infants? A …
Saw this paper by Ashley Rose and Josh Neufeld, “Microbial biogeography of a university campus” and just had to check it out. Basically the authors conduced a survey of door handles across 65 buildings and three time points on the Waterloo campus. What I think it most interesting about their results is the finding that …
A selection of new papers of interest for this readership, collected from my blog MicrobiomeDigest: Microbes in the air Evaluation of the potential for virus dispersal during hand drying: a comparison of three methods – Patrick T. Kimmitt, Keith F. Redway – Journal of Applied Microbiology ($$) Aims: To use a MS2 bacteriophage model to compare three …
A blog post from the Scottish Wildlife Trust by Ed Taylor discusses the importance of greenspace in Scotland’s suburban and urban areas. It’s part of a “50 for the Future” series that suggests 50 things that should occur in Scotland over the next 50 years to benefit both people and wildlife. As suburban areas are …
I was catching up on my NPR shows this evening and this one is definitely worth a listen. Here are the slides that they talk about in the podcast that summarize conversations with a focus group in England about antimicrobial resistance. Science Friday interviews Ed Young (who I highly recommend you follow on Twitter if you don’t already) …