#COVID19 Preprint Journal Club “SARS-CoV-2 in environmental samples of quarantined households”

So this one is from back in June, I had been meaning to check it out but was just reminded today on Twitter by Bastien Chevreux. “SARS-CoV-2 in environmental samples of quarantined households” is a fairly straightforward application of environmental surveillance to a household.  Virtually every other monitoring study I’ve seen (wastewater aside) has been …

Fungi and bacteria and lice, oh my! These are some of Rob Dunn’s favorite things. 

Source: Opinion | Discovering the Great Indoors Definitely worth checking out this opinion piece in the NY Times bye Rob Dunn on “Discovering the Great Indoors”. It has a bit about Van Leeuwenhoek, and bits about fungi and lice and bacteria and tardigrades and foldscope and more.  Rob Dunn is really one of the great …

Arthropod Diversity in Urban and Suburban Homes

A paper from Bertone et al studies indoor arthropod diversity in urban and suburban homes. They surveyed all the arthropods they could find in 50 homes in North Carolina, finding 24-128 distinct arthropod families per home! These critters were filtering in from the outdoor surroundings of the home, and most of them were benign to humans. They also found …

Invisible roommates (OK, not microbes, but nobody’s perfect)

This is just really really cool and even though it is not about microbes, since it is about the built environment I thought I would share it here: Meet your invisible roommates by Thom Patterson on CNN.Com. The article is about the work of Daniel Kariko at East Carolina University.  Kariko refers to the work as Suburban …

Microbial sampling starts in Cherokee Homes

(This is a guest post by Jordan Peccia at Yale University) After a six-month period of home recruitment, surface and aerosol sampling campaigns have begun in an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation indoor microbiome sponsored project awarded to Tulsa and Yale Universities. The goal of this proposed research is to explore how two central and modifiable …

University of Oregon research on microbial communities in 72 homes

The University of Oregon published this announcement on AAAS’ EurekAlert: Oregon architecture researchers to study indoor air quality in 72 homes. So a good song to play while reading this post would be: “Portland, Oregon” ‌‌by Loretta Lynn & Jack White. The press release starts off with a short summary of this project: University of Oregon researchers and industry partners …

Nicholas Osborne and Richard Sharpe on Moldy homes, ventilation, inflammation and immune health

This is a guest post from Nicholas Osborne from the University of Exeter Medical School.  I saw a paper of his that seemed very relevant to microBE.net “Indoor fungal diversity and asthma: A meta-analysis and systematic review of risk factors.” (by Sharpe RA, Bearman N, Thornton CR, Husk K1, Osborne NJ).  And so I wrote to …

The Microbial Tenants Below Your House

Maria Nunez and Hugo Hammer recently conducted a study of Scandinavian house foundations, with the goal of investigating the microbes that take advantage of the often moist conditions found in below-grade structures. The study identified five below-grade “specialist taxa” that were commonly found across all sample sites and analysed the relative ecological preferences of each. …