You have been purposefully re-directed here from www.spacemicrobes.org Sadly our fancy, custom built website couldn’t keep up with the times and had to be retired. This page contains some bare-bones information about Project MERCCURI as well as some links to places with more information. Project MERCCURI was a nationwide citizen science project started in 2012, …
News coverage of Project MERCCURI (through early 2018, this information was ported over from the now-defunct website for the project): UC Davis microbiologists analyze microbes on International Space Station | The Aggie (1-15-18) The International Space Station Is Teeming With Germs, But That’s A Good Thing | Tech Times (12-6-17) The space station is about …
Last week, the International Societies of Exposure Science and Indoor Air Quality had their joint meeting in Kaunas, Lithuania. The meeting featured a lot of great research on topics ranging from the thermal comfort of clothes to exposure to heavy metals from e-cigarettes and everything in between. While we can’t summarize the whole meeting here, …
Got this note to post from Dr Darren L. Smith from the HBBE to post here. ———————— The Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE) (www.bbe.ac.uk) is a £8M initiative between Northumbria and Newcastle Universities funded by Research England’s Extending Excellence in England (E3) scheme. HBBE will develop biotechnologies to create a new generation …
Just got pointed to this really awesome sounding job posting at NASA. Text below: Job Description Bioinformatics Scientist – 1079705 The Microbiology Laboratory at the NASA Johnson Space Center is seeking a highly motivated individual to fill a bioinformatics research position. The goal of the laboratory is to mitigate microbial risk to crew health, …
Antibiotic resistance has been assessed to rise to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally. At the same time the number of people dying from antibiotic-resistant bacteria is increasing. The World Health Organization considers the spread of antibiotic resistance and appropriate countermeasures as one …
So just a quick post about this new paper “Evaluation of Acquired Antibiotic Resistance in Escherichia coli Exposed to Long-Term Low-Shear Modeled Microgravity and Background Antibiotic Exposure“. Seems pretty straightforward… 1000 generations of E. coli in simulated microgravity… expose them to antibiotics and study the development of resistance. This is in contrast to some previous …
This is really cool. Or, actually, really hot. A new paper is out from Regina L. Wilpiszeski, Zhidan Zhang, and Christopher H. House at Penn State on their cool (oops again, hot) Citizen Microbiology project on microbes in water heaters. See the paper here Biogeography of thermophiles and predominance of Thermus scotoductus in domestic water heaters | …
The initial discovery of microorganisms by Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the mid to late 1600’s was an exploration of wonder. The two were some of the first to visually journey into the microscopic realm with the aid of simple microscopes. They turned their gaze to the ordinary spaces around us. Pouring into …
Day 2 of Lake Arrowhead kicked off with a nice mix of talks with seemingly a focus on biogeography and spatial resolution of microbial communities which was pretty interesting to see. First was Martin Ackermann from ETH Zurich, Switzerland “A Microscale Perspective on Microbial Interactions”. Introduced topic by talking about the need to understand what’s …