This air resistance is a real drag: global survey of antibiotic resistance genes in air samples

This new open access paper from Li et al may be of interest. Global Survey of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Air.   Abstract: Despite its emerging significant public health concern, the presence of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in urban air has not received significant attention. Here, we profiled relative abundances (as a fraction, normalized by 16S rRNA …

Podcast-Sarah Elizabeth Kwan, PhM, EIT – Peccia Env Biotechnology Lab at Yale – Microbiology of the Built Environment

Episode 445 interviews Sarah Kwan, who is a Ph.D. candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Peccia Environmental Biotechnology Laboratory at Yale University. She also received her M.S and Ph.M. in Environmental Engineering from Yale. Recently, she has been conducting research investigating the correlation of indoor air pollution in homes and schools of the Cherokee Nation …

Podcast-Brandon Boor, PhD and Jelle Laverge, PhD: Human exposure to indoor air pollutants in sleep microenvironments: A literature review

Episode 478 is about what air quality humans are exposed to in their sleep. Two fresh members of the science of indoor air quality field, Brandon Boor and Jelle Laverge, discuss what they found after a literature review on the topic.  

Paper of interest: Fungal Communities in Near Surface Air Are Similar across Northwestern Europe

This may be of interest: Fungal Communities Including Plant Pathogens in Near Surface Air Are Similar across Northwestern Europe Nicolaisen M, West JS, Sapkota R, Canning GGM, Schoen C and Justesen AF (2017) Fungal Communities Including Plant Pathogens in Near Surface Air Are Similar across Northwestern Europe. Front. Microbiol. 8:1729. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.01729 Information on the …

New paper of interest on antibiotic resistance genes in 4 CA cities but dangerous PR from UCLA

This new paper may be of interest: Source: Disparate Antibiotic Resistance Gene Quantities Revealed across 4 Major Cities in California: A Survey in Drinking Water, Air, and Soil at 24 Public Parks – ACS Omega (ACS Publications) Abstract: Widespread prevalence of multidrug and pandrug-resistant bacteria has prompted substantial concern over the global dissemination of antibiotic …

Green space influences human health and airborne microbial communities

A recent open access paper from the BioBE Center at University of Oregon explored the differences between airborne bacteria collected in parks and parking lots. Entitled “Urban greenness influences airborne bacterial community composition” and published in Science of the Total Environment, this interdisciplinary study combined research methods from microbiology and landscape architecture to answer the …

Bacterial Diversity in Greater Mexico City Air

A paper from this past year by García-Mena et al entitled “Airborne Bacterial Diversity from the Low Atmosphere of Greater Mexico City” uses culture techniques and 16S sequencing of the air in Greater Mexico City. There doesn’t seem to be as much literature on microbes in the air as there is about other surfaces and parts of …

A cloud of cloud things for detecting clouds

For the past couple of years, there has been a storm gathering on the horizon of indoor air quality monitoring. Nucleating around crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these devices seem to advect along roughly similar trajectories. The teams working on these projects have created a sort of high pressure system wafting high-quality industrial …

Nice step by step instructions on metagenomic sequencing from air samples – only one problem – it is Closed Access

There is an interesting and potentially very useful paper just out: Optimized DNA extraction and metagenomic sequencing of airborne microbial communities A brief summary from the journal: This protocol enables collection of airborne particulate matter; and after sample pretreatment, it allows sufficient quantities of microbial DNA to be extracted and prepared for downstream applications such …