Posting some details here on the upcoming AAAS Symposium on Microbiomes of the Built Environment. The meeting is coming up – on March 27, 2014 in Washington DC. And it will be webcast live. See here for details on the webcast. A more detailed agenda is here: Agenda from the AAAS Meeting Site
In a a new study (also covered by Smithsonian.com), researchers placed 572 bags of leaf litter in 20 sites within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and found that rates of decomposition varied by as much as 40%, correlating with the level of radioactive contamination at the site. The authors suggest that this is a worrying development, …
Just found an interesting new paper via automated Google Scholar searches: The Bio-Community Perl toolkit for microbial ecology. By Florent Angly, Christopher Fields, and Gene Tyson in Bioinformatics. Here is the abstract: Summary: The development of bioinformatic solutions for microbial ecology in Perl is limited by the lack of modules to represent and manipulate microbial community profiles …
Just got alerted by Paula Olsiewski & Eileen Choffnes to this paper Role of Transportation in Spread of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus Infection, United States by James Lowe, Phillip Gauger, Karen Harmon, Jianqiang Zhang, Joseph Connor, Paul Yeske, Timothy Loula, Ian Levis, Luc Dufresne, and Rodger Main. The paper is in the CDC journal “Emerging Infectious Diseases” and …
A really interesting aspect of Japan’s most recent and disastrous earthquake and tsunami involves microbial impact on cultural property and documents. Even as a student in microbiology, I never considered how these natural disasters could exacerbate the problem of biodeterioration. A 2013 article by Gu et al summarizes some important information presented at The International …
There was a recent flash in the news about the ‘5-second rule’ when a group of microbiologists at Aston University in the UK released results from a study (that, from what I can tell, is unpublished). The summary reads, “The study…monitored the transfer of the common bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus from …
I thought this might be of interest to some of the “microbiology of the Built Environment” crowd. I gave a talk at the UC Davis Bodega Bay Marine Lab as part of the Workshop on Applied Phylogenetics on the “Evolution of DNA Sequencing”. I posted the slides to Slideshare and am embedding them here. I …
You could say that I’m milking this one study design – one in which we surveyed the airborne microbial communities and surfaces around different units of a university housing complex – and you’d be right. But for good reason: it’s a powerful study design. We have replication of residential units of a common design across …
This interesting article published in “CLEAN- Soil, Air, Water” (behind a paywall) in March 2013 aims to describe an efficient procedure for sampling airborne microbes and fungi in indoor environments. Airborne bacteria and spores commonly induce respiratory systems such as asthma and allergies, so they are an important component of the built environment. Gauzere et …
On March 7, 2014, Ben Johnson wrote an all-encompassing blog post about the microbiome of the classroom’s built environment. (Dr. Jonathan Eisen also mentions Johnson’s article in a blog post a day afterwards.) In his blog post, not only does Johnson describe the different types of microbes living on the walls, desks, and chairs in the classroom, but …