This is just a quick post to introduce some early work products resulting from a really exciting project my team has been working on: the Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) Project (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The goal of OSBSS is to to design and develop a network of inexpensive, open source devices based on …
The Knight lab has been working hard testing new primers for 16S rRNA amplicon production and its time to share our progress. So far, the 16S rRNA V4 region forward primer (designated 515f) has been paired with five different reverse primers (806r, 926r, 967r, 1048r, and 1391r) to amplify ribosomal RNA from bacteria, Archaea, and …
The idea for GenomePeek began two years ago when I was working with Karl Klose, Liz Dinsdale, and Rob Edwards to assemble a P. salmonis genome that was being particularly difficult, even though we had 9 gigabases of sequencing. To check whether it was a single isolated genome I pulled out all the 16S reads …
As a biologist with a 3D printer, one of the questions I get most often about 3D printed parts is, “Can you autoclave these things?” As it turns out, no, not really. There are only a handful of thermoplastics that can survive the autoclave process, and most of them are not very good for 3D …
Bill Walsh of The Healthy Building Network has posted a story on the subject,”the Dirt on Antimicrobials” that covers the health effects concerns from the chemicals themselves but does not address the currently popular subject of the health harm or benefits from the presence of and exposures to the multitude of microbes in, on, and …
Last week, Holly Ganz from microBEnet organized a workshop on “Animals in the Built Environment”, focusing on the intersections between animal care, building design, and microbial ecology. Participants included zoo staff, shelter architects, engineers, microbial ecologists, etc. More detailed meeting reports will follow, but as a teaser here is the Storify from the meeting:
This is a guest post from Nicholas Osborne from the University of Exeter Medical School. I saw a paper of his that seemed very relevant to microBE.net “Indoor fungal diversity and asthma: A meta-analysis and systematic review of risk factors.” (by Sharpe RA, Bearman N, Thornton CR, Husk K1, Osborne NJ). And so I wrote to …
A great new mini review (“The dual role of microbes in corrosion,” Nardy Kip and Johannes A van Vee) discussing the dual role of microbes in corrosion and corrosion inhibition has recently been published in the ISME Journal. Though not OpenAccess, because the article is so relevant to the built environment community, I wanted to …
Well, it looks like the White House is requesting feedback on funding priorities relating to Science and Technology topics. See Federal Register | Strategy for American Innovation. In the summary they write: The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council request public comments to provide input into an upcoming update of …
If you read this blog, you probably know a thing or two or more about antibiotic resistance. Especially in terms of how humans have aided in furthering it. This LA Times article reports that in mid-September, President Obama signed an executive order aiming to combat drug-resistant microbes. A 20 million dollar prize will be given …