Yes, Virginia, you “emit” microbes when you walk into a room

Posted on April 19, 2012 by

Glad to see this paper on emission of bacteria by people is now available under Wiley’s “Open Access” option: Size-resolved emission rates of airborne bacteria and fungi in an occupied classroom – Qian – 2012

I am particularly glad since this one got a lot of media coverage and I think it is VERY important for the actual papers behind news stories be made available to the public.  So – this is a few weeks late but better later than never.

Here are some of the news stories:

and more
 
Stafford livingroom

Image By Aimcotest (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted in Journal club, News | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Oh no – computer mice have more “germs” than toilet seats #Germophobia

Posted on April 6, 2012 by

Well, this week the target of the “how many microbes are there on ….?” question from the press is your computer and it’s mice: How Your Office Computer Mouse Carries Three Times More Germs Than A Toilet Seat | Leadership Newspapers.

The obsession in the press with “how many microbes can you find on something” continues unabated I guess. Here is a prediction – if you compare two places to each other – most of the time one of them will have a higher count of microbial cells than the other.  Seriously.

And here is another prediction – if you send someone out to swab various parts of a house or an office or a restaurant – most of the time you will be able to find places where there are more microbes than in the bathroom.  Seriously.

Let me ask a hypothetical question.  If someone offered you two bowls of cereal.  In one, they add yoghurt with trillions of cells of bacteria.  In the other they add milk with 10,000 cells of E. coli O157:H7.  Which would you eat?  Scared of those trillions of bacteria in the yoghurt? We need to just put an end to this “let’s count how many bacteria are in different places” and start asking “what kind of (and how many) bacteria (and/or other microbes) are in different places?”

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New microBEnet pages: Sampling statistics and Sloan grantees

Posted on April 5, 2012 by

Looking for input on a couple of new pages on the microBEnet site.

The first is a revised, updated list of all the grantees in the Sloan Foundation’s microbiology of the built environment program.  This might be useful for anyone considering the recent call for proposals.  If you’re a Sloan Grantee, we’d really appreciate it if you could check to see that the list of Co-PI’s for your grant is correct.

Secondly, we’re trying to assemble a collection of resources on the statistics of sampling design that might be useful for people working on the microbiology of the built environment.  If you know of any good sources, printed or online, simple or complex, please let us know and we’ll add them to the list.

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microBEnet blog tag cloud via Wordle (I love Wordle)

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

I really love Wordle and Tag Clouds. Here is one for the microBEnet blog. For the original version at Wordle see here. 

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New probiotic bacteria shows promise for use in shellfish aquaculture

Posted on April 1, 2012 by

We’ve talked here in the past about the idea of probiotics for buildings (which is many years in the future, if ever) and pretty much everyone has heard about probiotics for human health (currently an issue of much debate).

One of the problems with both buildings and people is the difficulty of testing a hypothesis such as “does adding this particular bacteria affect some measurable outcome?”

An interesting study from NOAA, released this January, focuses on oyster aquaculture where the use of probiotics is both tractable to study, and has potentially important commercial applications.

While research is still in the early stages, the researchers found that adding a particular bacteria (isolated from adult oysters) to embryos significantly increase their survival rates, presumably through displacement of disease-causing bacteria.   Most importantly, this kind of treatment could reduce the need for antibiotics, the use of which is a major issue with most shellfish agriculture.

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Lots of press for recent Sloan-funded study: “Size-resolved emission rates of airborne bacteria and fungi in an occupied classroom”

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

This study came out online in February and provided a very interesting look into the role of human occupancy in relation to indoor biological aerosols.  Most strikingly the authors found that millions of bacteria and fungi are added to the air in an occupied room, mostly through stirring up previously deposited organisms.

Yesterday an article about this work came out in Discovery, and since then it’s been all over the press.   A few other links are below:

Science Daily News: “With You in the Room, Bacteria Counts Spike — By About 37 Million Bacteria Per Hour”

Daily Mail: “Whenever you enter a room you stir 37 million bacteria into the air – every hour”


Forbes: “Study: Humans Add Millions of Microbes to the Air Every Hour”

 

 

 

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New grant in Sloan Program: “Microbially Visible Home”

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

Another new grant in the microbiology of the built environment program, by Rob Knight at CU Boulder, in collaboration with Robert Van Pelt:

Title: “Microbially Visible Home”

“The Microbially Visible Home will perform dense spatial and temporal sampling of the ArcheType sustainable house in Toronto, linking microbial data to BIM (Building Information Models) in order to understand the factors that affect the distribution of microbes in the indoor environment. The project will also pilot new visualization methods for understanding microbial distribution patterns.”

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“An evolving architecture” – nice talk by James Scott from IAQA meeting #microBEnet

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

James Scott, from U. Toronto and Sporometrics was kind enough to share a paper version of the keynote talk he gave recently at the IAQA meeting in Las Vegas.  Entitled “An Evolving Architecture” it covers a lot of topics related to indoor microbiology and the use of molecular methods to study microbes.  Here is a PDF of the talk: An evolving architecture-handout.

Posted in Meetings and Conference Reports, Seminars | Leave a comment

Request for Proposals: Sloan Foundation program in the Microbiology of the Built Environment

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

An official missive from the Sloan Foundation (PDF version here)

Dear Colleague −

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has created a new funding opportunity in its Microbiology of the Built Environment program.

The Foundation seeks to support up to four new studies of the microbiology of the built environment.  Successful projects will be either hypothesis driven research or studies of building materials and their effects on microbial communities.  The Foundation is no longer funding microbiological surveys of built environments.

A better understanding of the microbiology of built environments – where people live, work and play most of their lives – may provide results that could directly influence air and water quality regulation, building design and operation, and human health.  The Foundation is not interested in studying exotic environments.  The program focuses on those built environments in which large numbers of people spend extended amounts of time, such as homes, offices, schools, businesses, hospitals, and vehicles.

Qualifications.  A successful project will have the following attributes:

  • multidisciplinary team of PI and co-PIs in relevant disciplines (e.g., building sciences, microbiology, genomics, ecology, engineering, and public health)
  • keen interest in advancing knowledge of the microbiology of built environments using state of the art culture independent methods
  • commitment to publishing in both the life sciences and building sciences literature
  • commitment to open access for knowledge generated, including depositing data in the MoBe DAC
  • ability to begin operations before the end of calendar year 2012
  • matching funds are desirable.

Each award will be a maximum of $250,000 to be spent over 12 to 24 months.  The budget may include indirect costs of up to 15% within the $250,000 limit.

Mandatory Letters of Intent are due Friday June 1, 2012

If you or your colleagues are interested, please send a letter of intent that includes a proposal cover sheet, a two-page summary of your ideas, and two-page CVs of key individuals to olsiewski@sloan.org with a copy to my assistant, Yolanda Wolf at wolf@sloan.org.  A single pdf file of all documents will be appreciated.

The Foundation will review the letters of intent by June 15, 2012.  After the initial review, a small number of applicants will be asked to prepare a full proposal due July 15, 2012 in accordance with our Grant Application Guidelines.  The Foundation expects to announce the four recipients in September 2012, with funds available starting October 1, 2012.

If you have specific questions, please feel free to contact me at olsiewski@sloan.org.

Thank you for your consideration.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Paula J. Olsiewski, Ph.D.

Posted in Funding, Sloan Program | 1 Comment

Paper on fungal “barcoding” using ribosomal ITS region

Posted on March 27, 2012 by

A new paper is out supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s “microbiology of the Built Environment program” — Nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer ITS region as a universal DNA barcode marker for Fungi.  It is available for free to all via the PNAS “Open Option”.

The paper discussing work assessing the potential for various sites to be used as “barcoding” markers for studies of fungi.  In this context, barcoding refers to the sequencing of a particular region of the genome as a way of typing organisms via their DNA.  Barcoding is in essence an extension of Carl Woese’s (and other people’s) pioneering work on rRNA characterization of microbes (although unfortunately many of the people doing barcoding fail to reference or acknowledge the similarities to work on rRNA analysis of microbes).  It is used more and more to aid in typing of samples.  And this paper attempts to expand the barcoding effort more formally to fungi.  That should be helpful to characterize lots of environments, including the built environment.

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