Many indoor environmental investigators have attempted to use volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by microbes as an indicator of the presence or potential health relevance of the indoor microbiome. These compounds emitted by microbes are generally referred to as MVOCs. The airborne concentrations of MVOCs is usually too low for characterization by the usual indoor …
We’ve recently received an award from the Sloan Foundation to examine the mycobiota from paired house dust and infant fecal samples collected in the first year of life. The main purpose of the study is to examine how the immediate environment (house dust) may shape the gut mycobiota of infants and affect immune activation and …
The most recent Sloan-funded project began work in the lab of Roberto Kolter in early July. The name of the project is “The Effects of Surface pH on Microbial Community Composition and Susceptibility to Invasion”. Unlike many of the previous projects funded by the microbiology of the built environment program, this is an experimental lab …
Checking out this new paper from Rachel Adams, Anthony Amend, John Taylor and Thomas Bruns: A Unique Signal Distorts the Perception of Species Richness and Composition in High-Throughput Sequencing Surveys of Microbial Communities: a Case Study of Fungi in Indoor Dust – Online First – Springer. It is open access so anyone out there can get …
Just received an announcement that a new project has been funded through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment. The project is titled “The House Dust Fungal Microbiome — Influences and Effects.” and the PI is Susan V. Lynch from UCSF. She kindly sent us a summary description of the …
Of possible interest to studies of microbiology of the built environment is a new paper: PLOS Pathogens: Asthma and the Diversity of Fungal Spores in Air. By Anne Pringle from Harvard University, the goal is summed up pretty well by the author With this primer, my aim is to facilitate communication by providing doctors with a …
The next of the new Sloan foundation funded projects in the field is being undertaken by Jordan Peccia at Yale University and is entitled “Qualitative Building Moisture Characteristics and Microbial Diversity” Project description below: There exists a significant gap in our understanding of how the building environment mediates human exposure to bacterial and fungal diversity. …
The Sloan Foundation recently convened grantees for the 2nd Conference on the Microbiology of the Built Environment, and the opening talk focused on the benefits of collaboration. Carlos Rodriguez reminded us (I’m paraphrasing), “When you look at problems in silos, you find solutions in silos. But when you look at problems across disciplines, you find …
Another SIGS meeting report of interest: Meeting Report: Fungal ITS Workshop (October 2012) | Bates | Standards in Genomic Sciences. This one discusses issues in sampling and characterizing fungi using ITS sequencing.
One of our broad goals at BIMERC, the UC Berkeley group funded by Sloan, is to look at what microbes are found indoors and why. We first tackled this in homes and decided to survey in a university family housing complex – in essence, getting replication in the built environment while eliminating potential sources of …