Just a quick one here. The Google News archive has all sorts of interesting stuff in there. Much of it is not fully free / in the open but it is still interesting. For example, – check out this article reporting the first association of a bacterial association with “Legion disease”: St. Petersburg Times – Google …
A new paper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology is not surprisingly getting a bunch of press “Bacterial Hand Contamination and Transfer after Use of Contaminated Bulk-Soap-Refillable Dispensers” by Zapka et al. I note the article is freely available online. Some of the news stories about this include: Bacteria-Laden Soap Not So Clean : Discovery …
A UN panel has issued a recent report on the cholera outbreak in Haiti. The report reviews genetic, genomic, epidemiological and other studies that relate to the origins of the cholera outbreak. The conclusion is a bit disconcerting – most likely the outbreak was introduced by UN personnel and was related to poor construction of …
There is a new #openaccess article in ISME of great importance to those studying the microbiology of the built environment: The ISME Journal – The genomic standards consortium: bringing standards to life for microbial ecology. This article focuses mostly on those characterizing “marker genes” (i.e., genes of value in phylogenetic characterization of taxa) in some way. …
OK, so the article is a few years old (and not open access) but it should win a prize for best/worst title in a recent paper on indoor microbiology: A glimpse under the rim — the composition of microbial biofilm communities in domestic toilets – Egert – 2009 – Journal of Applied Microbiology I note …
Just a quick post here – there is more detail on the recent JHU study on bacteria in faucets. Electronic faucets hinder, not help, hospital infection control | Johns Hopkins University – The Gazette.
Norman R. Pace, from UC Boulder, gave a talk at UC Davis yesterday about microbial diversity. In his talk he discussed some of his recent Sloan Foundation funded work on “microbiology of the built environment” including studies of shower heads, indoor swimming pools, water supplies, and hospitals. Pace is one of the pioneers of DNA …