Interesting article about a “living alternative to concrete”. Ignoring the fact that the final product is not actually living, this is a pretty cool idea. This product uses bacteria to produce a concrete-like substance using much less energy than traditional methods. A number of similar ideas are the in the works including mushroom-grown bricks. Some …
Heard a very interesting story on NewsHour yesterday about portable classrooms: The story is reported by Katie Campbell of KCTS in Seattle. Some of the issues discussed in the context of “reinventing” portable classrooms include carbon dioxide monitoring, sustainability and the Living Building Standards, using solar for electricity, natural ventilation instead of noisy HVAC units, …
For those interested in molecular studies of fungi these two posts by Jenna Lang may be of interest: What the fungi do I do with my ITS library? What the fungi do I do with my ITS library (Part 2) Jenna is a post-doc in my lab and has worked on many different microbiome related projects over …
One of the unmet challenges to the Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment (MoBE) program is the sharing of the results of the Foundation-funded studies as well as other studies of the indoor and built environment microbiome. At the American Society for Microbiology’s annual conference in Boston last week, I was impressed by Pieter …
Having been camped out in Portland, OR this week to speak at the 2014 Joint Aquatic Sciences Meeting, I woke up this morning to find a “boil water alert” had been issued for the entire city. Repeated testing over the last few days has found fecal contamination (E. coli) in the city’s reservoirs. So that means a lockdown …
This year’s ASM meeting in Boston provided a chance for many of the Sloan-funded grantees working on the microbiology of the built environment to get together for a dinner for a good mix of socialization and collaboration. Here’s a few pictures, courtesy of Paula Olsiewski.
The following is the Executive Summary of a report on the AAAS “Microbiomes of the Built Environment Symposium”, March 27th, 2014, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The full report can be found here. The research field of Microbiomes of the Built Environment (MoBE) is relatively new, evolving about ten years ago from …
Just pointed to this story: Microbial stowaways to Mars identified : Nature News & Comment by Darlene Cavalier, our collaborator on the “Space Microbes” Project MERCCURI. The article reports on a presentation by Stephanie Smith at the ASM 2014 meeting going on in Boston. Smith presented results from characterizing (via culturing) the microbes present on various parts …
There is an interesting and important paper out in Microbiology: Hand Bacterial Communities Vary Across Two Different Human Populations by Denina Hospodsky, Amy J. Pickering, Timothy R. Julian , Dana Miller, Sisira Gorthala, Alexandria B. Boehm, and Jordan Peccia. This paper is important for many reasons including the following: They found significant variation in the communities found on …
Metadata collected for MoBE studies can be organized and submitted to QIIME utilizing the MIxS-BE metadata standard. Templates for data submission and a Metadata Standard Submission Guide (see below) will be posted to microbe.net Resources. Please contact Lynn Schriml (lschriml@som.umaryland.edu) for questions regarding mapping your data to the MIxS metadata standard or Gail Ackermann (gail.ackermann@colorado.edu) at QIIME …