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 …
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Welcome to microBEnet News May 2013 MicroBEnet Blogs A brief summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net A few guest posts this month which is great! We started off with Walking in the footsteps of van Leeuwenhoek by Keith Seifert. Other guest posts included a software carpentry workshop summary by Jenna Lang and …
MicroBEnet Blogs A summary of the recent topics posted on microBE.net As usual, our blog posts this summer spanned a wide range of topics relevant to the microbiology of the built environment, ranging from concrete to germophobia. Announcements: Abstract Submission open for Healthy Buildings Europe 2015 Sloan Microbiology of the Built Environment Data Analysis Workshop …
What is it? Gut Check is a game for 2-4 players where each player attempts to develop a healthy microbiome while interfering with the microbiomes of their opponents. Give your friends the plague, botulism and more! Go to work sick to get rid of a pathogen, take some probiotics, or have some lasagna (if you …
I. Introduction There is an oft-cited hierarchy for data, wherein ideally it should flow: Data –>Information –>Knowledge –>Wisdom (DIKW). Just because you have data, it takes some processing to get quality information, and even good information is not necessarily knowledge, and knowledge often requires context or application to become wisdom. For example, you could have …
Well, the stories just keep coming about antimicrobial agents we can use to kill off some pathogen in our environment. Today’s is about plasma – yes plasma – and how it can deactivate norovirus in the environment: ‘Cold plasma’ kills off norovirus from the BBC. The article discusses a new study in the journal mBio. Some key …
Compiling some of the more interesting tools I have seen recently. Some I have plyed with but most I have just looked at the papers briefly. Microbiome | Abstract | VizBin – an application for reference-independent visualization and human-augmented binning of metagenomic data. Global biogeographic sampling of bacterial secondary metabolism GrammR: Graphical Representation and Modeling …
Almost everyone in developed countries uses cosmetics, from body washes to make-up. In the US, the cosmetics industry makes over $56 billion dollars in revenue. As a society, we use a lot of personal care products. And in order for those products to have a useful shelf-life, they contain antimicrobials – no one wants to open their …