Gareth Griffith’s Slate article (2012) on endangered microbes told a story that had honestly never occurred to me. Sure, there are endangered species all over the world, and we are all too aware of organizations like the IUCN that classify and aim to preserve such creatures. But none of the organisms on IUCN’s Red List are microbes. …
Right now, in Boulder, CO, the Annual Meeting for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment program is happening. More about the program can be found here and here. Alas, I cannot be there this year. But I will be following as much as possible via Twitter. To follow Tweets from the meeting look …
The American Museum of Natural History just released a new short documentary that highlights built environment microbiology research. Actually the film is about antibiotic resistance evolution in Staphylococcus aureus, but the filmmakers also wanted to highlight the not-so-ominous interactions we have with the built environment microbiome every day. So they came out to Oregon to …
New paper out from the microbiology of the built environment community: MIxS-BE: a MIxS extension defining a minimum information standard for sequence data from the built environment. The joint first authors are Elizabeth Glass and Yekaterina Dribinsky. And the senior author is Lynn Schriml. The paper is simple but I think very important – it describes …
Job posting regarding multiple post-doc positions in a multi-discliplnary project managed by the University of California Berkeley (UCB), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and the National University of Singapore (NUS): Up to four postdoctoral scholar appointments are available for a joint new research program between the University of California Berkeley (UCB), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and …
Another just-approved project in the built environment. This project led by Noah Fierer (CU Boulder), Shelly Miller (CU Boulder) and Rob Dunn (North Carolina State) will look at the factors structuring bacterial and fungal diversity in 1,000 homes across the United States. We propose the first continental-scale study testing how and why house-associated microbial communities …
The Sloan Foundation today announced funding for a pilot study looking at the effects of weatherization on the indoor airborne microbiome. This work will be performed by Largus Angenent at Cornell University. The full summary of the project is below: The U.S. Department of Energy has instituted a weatherization program aimed at making homes more …
Well we’ve just wrapped of the first (of three) annual conferences on the Microbiology of the Built Environment here in Boulder. I thought the meeting went really well, a big thanks again to the organizers Mark Hernandez and Alina Handorean. There were a lot of tweets during the meeting which we’ll collect using Storify and …