A recent microbe.net post discussed the use of copper as an antimicrobial to prevent infections in healthcare settings. This is not a particularly new concept, but unfortunately, the literature appears dominated by authors who received funding from the copper industry and its associations. Such industrial funding is not unique to copper and is, sadly, more …
In researching previous studies conducted on microbes in space for Project MERCURRI, I ran across an interesting microbiology diversity study done on European Spacecraft-Associated (ESA) clean rooms in the Herschel Space Observatory. Historically, clean rooms are supposedly “sterile” environments that are used for the building and maintenance of spacecrafts, as directed by the UN’s Outer Space planetary …
Imagine you have a camera with a special “anti-macro” lens. This lens scrubs from any image all plants and animals and other “macro” organisms. And this lens also highlights the remaining living things – the microorganisms – anywhere in the frame (including those that were in or on the macro organisms removed from the image). …
Most people who know me call me Bubba. The name you will find on a paper that just came out, is my “official” name, Brandon. However, my first given name is, in fact, Bubba, a moniker I acquired during my brief hospitalization as a premature infant, the very topic of my first first-author paper. Since …
We know that human babies born through vaginal birth are colonized by their mother’s microbes but what about the case of premature infants? A paper published by Jill Banfield and colleagues as part of a Sloan-funded project investigates the connection between microbial communities of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and those of the premature infant gut. Premature infants …
Sept. 18, 2013. Magill House – I’m in a B&B that was once a cure cottage in the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake, New York, where for more than 70 years tuberculosis patients came from the big city hoping that the cold mountain air would cure their disease. Half the houses had TB patients near …
Quick post to call attention to this meeting report: The Hospital Microbiome Project: Meeting Report for the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project, Chicago, USA, January 15th, 2013 | Gilbert | Standards in Genomic Sciences. From the paper “This report details the outcome of the 2nd Hospital Microbiome Project workshop held on January 15th at the University of …
Just wrote a post a few minutes ago about the sequencing and analysis of the genome(s) of representatives of the TM6 phylum of bacteria that were found in a hospital sink biofilm: First genome of TM6 — a novel phylum of bacteria — determined from a hospital sink sample. And lo and behold just realized there …
Interesting new paper out from the J. Craig Venter Institute. The paper is in PNAS: Candidate phylum TM6 genome recovered from a hospital sink biofilm provides genomic insights into this uncultivated phylum. Thankfully it was published under the PNAS Open Access option so anyone / everyone has access to the paper. In the paper the authors …
A paper of potential interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd has just been published: Surface Microbes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Changes with Routine Cleaning and Over Time. From Nicholas Bokulich, David Mills and Mark Underwood at UC Davis it focuses on rRNA PCR based characterization of microbes (bacteria and fungi) on …