By Amanda Makowiecki 1st Year Mechanical Engineering PhD Student Miller Research Group, University of Colorado Boulder Researchers at the University of Oregon recently published a paper examining the connection between architectural design and microbial diversity in our buildings (Kembel et al. 2014). Although occupancy type was identified as the strongest predictor of microbial variation, several …
Well, I made a list. I had written up text justifying everything on this list but I think it is better to just publish the list and then discuss. Any additional suggestions or comments would be welcome. 1. Microbes are small, mostly 2. Microbes are not simple 3. No microbe alive today is ancient 4. …
Every day, diverse microbial communities with cell levels of 106-108 cells/liter migrate from drinking water treatment plants through a complex network of pipes in drinking water distribution systems and into our built environment. Managing this mass migration is critical from multiple perspectives. Some of these microorganisms can make consumers ill, some can contribute to pipe …
For many years I have been worried about how space travel will affect microbiomes – of the space vehicles and of the residents (people, other animals, plants, etc). This is one of the reasons we started Project MERCCURI and get involved in looking at the microbes on the International Space Station. It is also why …
The idea for GenomePeek began two years ago when I was working with Karl Klose, Liz Dinsdale, and Rob Edwards to assemble a P. salmonis genome that was being particularly difficult, even though we had 9 gigabases of sequencing. To check whether it was a single isolated genome I pulled out all the 16S reads …
“Susceptibility of green and conventional building materials to microbial growth” Indoor Air journal, accepted for publication Abstract Green building materials are becoming more popular. However, little is known about their ability to support or limit microbial growth. The growth of fungi was evaluated on five building materials. Two green, two conventional building materials and wood …
I’ve been remotely following the Sloan MBE meeting discussions (happening in Boulder, CO this week), and yesterday there was a lot of Twitter discussion focused on data visualization tools. How do we make sense of the millions of DNA sequences we generate from microbial ecology projects in the Built Environment? I thought I’d use this opportunity to highlight …
“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …
Registrants for the March AAAS Symposium are recipients today of the following message from Anette Olsen at AAAS. “I’d like to let you know that the videos of each panel is now online, but they currently remain unedited. We anticipate another two weeks before the edited versions are placed online. In the meantime, here is …
Illustration (from OpenScar.com) an explanation of the beginning of the spread of SARS in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex where the index case was in a building 60 meters away from a building where about 45% of the 300 infected individuals at Amoy Gardens lived. Many of the other infected individuals also lived in …
