Just a short post about a news story recently where they have traced Pseudomonas found in NICU infants to the pipes in the building. It’s still in the early stages of the investigation… but it makes me wonder why routine surveillance isn’t more common. I feel like we often hear stories about finding Legionella, Pseudomonas, …
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 my report from Day 2 of the Microbiology of the Built Environment Conference in Boulder… the 5th annual and last of its kind! Storify of the tweets from the day below. The opening talk on Day 2 was by Martin Taubel from the National Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland, “Of house dust and …
This week’s papers are about microbes found on hospital doorknobs, spacecraft assembly cleanrooms, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, in waste water, and in creosote-treated wood composting. I could not find a song about the specific painting featured here, but Panic at the Disco had a song about another famous painting by LdV: The Ballad of Mona …
Well, I am no lawyer but this certainly seems interesting from a microbial point of view: Court’s Reasoning That “Bacteria” Is Not A “Pollutant” Favorable For Policyholders In Other Cases – Insurance – United States. From the article: That court found that “under Louisiana law, Legionella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria” — the bacteria which cause Legionnaire’s …
Had to post about this recent paper that came out in PLOS ONE, “Spaceflight Promotes Biofilm Formation by Pseudomonas aeruginosa“. Obviously we’re thinking a lot about bacterial activity in space, apropos of our Project MERCCURI work. Really the title says it all here. Biofilms are awesome. Space is awesome. Turns out that biofilms in space …
Here are a few of the talks from the built environment session of the Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomes meeting (previous blog post here). This session was sponsored by microBEnet. James Meadow, from the BioBE Center. Jason Stajich, part of the MoBEDAC project. Susana Remold from the University of Louisville.
Last night was the Microbiology of the Built Environment session at the bi-annual Lake Arrowhead meeting. This session was organized and sponsored by microBEnet. I recorded some of the talks and will post those videos here after some editing. Here’s a summary of the speakers and the topics discussed. The first speaker was James Meadow …
The last flight of the Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for early July and there’ll be some cool microbes aboard. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus are both biofilm-forming bacteria with serious health consequences, particularly in hospitals. The researchers involved in this project are interested in the effects of microgravity on biofilm formation, and have some preliminary …
Next in my ongoing series of posts related to beneficial microbes in the built environment… using Pseudomonas to restore 17th century Italian frescoes. Apparently these particular frescoes were improperly restored in the 1960’s using some kind of gelatin glue that now causes salt crystals to grow on the art. Both chemical and mechanical removal methods …