Another NASEM meeting of possible interest. Both in person and online, October 22nd, 2018. Here’s a link to the registration. We invite you to join the open session of our fourth committee meeting. At the meeting we will hear from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) on implementation of their 2014 directive. We will also hear …
New paper of interest:: Genomic Analysis of Hospital Plumbing Reveals Diverse Reservoir of Bacterial Plasmids Conferring Carbapenem Resistance Weingarten RA, Johnson RC, Conlan S, Ramsburg AM, Dekker JP, Lau AF, Khil P, Odom RT, Deming C, Park M, Thomas PJ, NISC Comparative Sequencing Program, Henderson DK, Palmore TN, Segre JA, Frank KM. 2018. Genomic analysis …
Microbes indoors DNA metabarcoding to assess indoor fungal communities: Electrostatic dust collectors and Illumina sequencing – Steffi Rocchi – Journal of Microbiological Methods ($39.95) Our study aimed to evaluate metabarcoding and bioinformatic analysis resulting from calibrated samples and samples collected by an electrostatic dust collector (EDC) in dwellings with no moisture problems. Thus, the fungal communities of …
Catching up after a couple of busy weeks. Microbes in the hospital Diversity changes of microbial communities into hospital surface environments – Rika Yano – Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy ($31.50) Previous works have demonstrated considerable variability in hospital cleanliness in Japan, suggesting that contamination is driven by factors that are currently poorly controlled. We undertook 16S …
The Flint Water Crisis garnered national and international media coverage of elevated levels of lead in the water delivered to consumers’ taps. When the city of Flint began using the Flint River as its drinking water source without the addition of a corrosion inhibitor beginning in April 2014, the corrosive new water began to leach …
Microbes in the city Also see this blog post earlier this week: Urban Transit System Microbial Communities Differ by Surface Type and Interaction with Humans and the Environment – Tiffany Hsu – mSystems (OA) Public transit systems are ideal for studying the urban microbiome and interindividual community transfer. In this study, we used 16S amplicon and …
Here’s the report from Day 1 of the 5th annual Microbiology of the Built Environment meeting in Boulder, CO. Following my summary of the talks is a Storify of all the tweets from the day. The first talk of the day was by Ulla Haverinen-Shaughnessy from the University of Eastern Finland whose talk was entitled …
Anyone considering the possibility of welcoming a new furry friend into their home must first come to terms with an unfortunate fact: animals are dirty, like us most of them have lots of hair and are messy. And for a place like the Berkeley Animal Shelter, which sees well over a thousand animals each year, “poop …
(Update: after posting this I found that actual experts have proposed a different hypothesis) So the recent Legionnaires’ Disease Outbreak in Flint, Michigan has been getting quite a bit of press recently. For example in the last few days here are pieces from The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and CNN. The very short version of …
2013-5-19MBPF Source: Sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment | Microbiome | Full Text Really nice new review paper by Aaron Prissin and Linsey Marr. It covers research on sources of airborne microbes including Humans Pets Plants Plumbing HVACs Water damage Dust Outdoor air Really thorough with tons of references and discussion of the …