The latest papers on microbiome of buildings and other objects used by humans. Today, we have microbiomes of water reservoirs and plumbing pipes, Brazilian money notes, an Italian cheese factory, and a brewery. For more microbiome papers from other sources (both human-associated or environmental), check out my daily blog MicrobiomeDigest.com. Impact of Water Chemistry, Pipe …
The environmental engineering research community now recognizes that it is important to understand the bacterial ecology of premise (building) plumbing systems to control opportunistic pathogens (OP). Many investigations, including those supported by the Sloan Foundation MoBE program, have begun to shed light on the factors driving bacterial ecology in drinking water systems. While the bacterial …
Quick post here on a hospital water sampling study in Italy that found much higher levels of potentially pathogenic bacteria (e.g. Legionella) in aerators than in the rest of the plumbing system. Reading this gives a really good sense of how complicated it is to maintain a sufficiently sterile water distribution system for immunocompromised patients …
A group of us from Jonathan Eisen’s lab attended the General Meeting for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) last month in Boston. A major highlight of the conference was “We Are Not Alone: Microbial Revelations of the Built Environment,” a symposium that was organized by the Junior Advisory Group that is made up of postdocs and …
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 …
This weekend while cleaning my dishes I noticed a troubling rotten-egg odor emanating from the drain, helpfully reminding me that it was not only time to run the garbage disposal but also to clean out the sink. “I think our colonies of sulfate reducers are coming along well,” I quipped to my roommate. But being …
Just a quick post to point out an article on phys.org talking about Amy Pruden’s fascinating work on probiotics for plumbing. Read her microBEnet post about the work here and a related post by Kyle Bibby here. From the phys.org article: “We believe this microbiome can be harnessed to control opportunistic pathogens,” Pruden said. For …
Hats off to Tuesday’s New York Times article, “A Quest for Even Safer Drinking Water,” for daring to bring microbiology to the people. The article sheds light several key reasons we can no longer afford to ignore the vast microbial diversity that exists within the drinking water environment, among them are opportunistic pathogens and antibiotic …
Next in our “People Behind the Science” series is Kyle Bibby from the University of Pittsburgh. In this interview he talks about his future work on premise plumbing and the hospital microbiome project. Transcript of interview:
The Sloan Program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment awarded a few new grants this spring. The first of these was to Kyle Bibby at the University of Pittsburgh called “Microbial Ecology Dynamics of Hospital Premise Plumbing Following the Introduction of an On-Site Monochloramine Disinfection System”. The project is being conducted in collaboration with …