Just in time for the long weekend (where we all will be catching up with the literature – ahem), here is another collection of recent papers about microbiology of the built environment. The first paper is about the mattress microbiome, so the video song Jump from Glee came to mind (“Here at Mattress Land we believe that …
My name is Katie Dahlhausen and I am A PhD student in Jonathan’s lab. I am crowd-funding a project to study this fascinating koala biology, as well as investigate alternative infectious disease treatment where antibiotics are not a viable option. Want to help out these adorable critters? You can support the Indiegogo campaign here, which …
We write a fair bit about antibiotic resistance on this blog, but seldom about the alternatives. Obviously, medicine shouldn’t avoid using antibiotics altogether, but we do need better management and use of our current anti-microbial compounds. We also need new methods of treating infection. Nature News has a brief but informative list of antibiotic alternatives written by …
A recent study from Su et al tests the effects of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) on the amount of culturable airborne bacteria in elementary school classrooms. As expected, they found lower concentrations of these bacteria with UVGI treatment. Only the first page of the paper is available, unfortunately, so perhaps this is already addressed, but it …
About a month ago, listeria found in Sabra Hummus caused a massive food safety recall across the US. So I got to thinking — how common are pathogens in the food we eat and how is this addressed on industrial scales? Food is processed, transported, and eaten in our built environments multiple times a day, …
Appropriate song to play while reading this post: Doctor! Doctor! – Thompson Twins Despite the many hours we spend inside homes, offices, and other buildings, we still know very little about the microorganisms that live inside these walls. Health-care facilities are very important in this respect, because the humans inside these buildings are often immunocompromised: they are …
There are few constants in this world. One exception, however, is the passing of day to night, which has gone on without fail since life first emerged on Earth. Early life quickly learned to anticipate changes associated with light and dark. This ability to tell time – to peer into the immediate future – was …
by Simon A. Hernandez & Nichole A. Broderick Since its launch in summer 2013, the Small World Initiative (SWI) has expanded from a small “Microbes to Molecules” course at Yale University to a multi-institutional (60 institutions in 5 countries) organization with more than 2000 students and alumni. Professor Jo Handelsman and colleagues at Yale pioneered …
A recent NPR article raised the concern of drug-resistant food poisoning. Specifically, Ciprofloxacin-resistant Shigella. This strain was imported with US travellers coming from all over the world, but has now spread around the nation. Doctors are now starting to treat multi-drug resistant Shigella using IV instead of oral antibiotics. The article states: Multidrug-resistant Shigella has caused several outbreaks …
Just got wind of this upcoming meeting, “Microbes in the City: Mapping the Urban Genome” that looks like it has a fantastic series of talks lined up. The meeting is a single day, June 19th, and is hosted by The New York Academy of Sciences and New York University. From the conference website, here’s the …