We were super excited to see the recent paper “Recovery of nearly 8,000 metagenome-assembled genomes substantially expands the tree of life“. Really, the title says it all… the authors took hundreds of published metagenomic studies (focusing on non-human environments) and assembled thousands of genomes. Awesome. But we were curious how many of these genomes came …
Just a quick post here. Another story on Legionnaires Disease. This time the bacteria behind it was found in the NY Police Station. Source: Bacteria Behind Legionnaires’ Disease Found at New York Police Station – The New York Times From the article Traces of the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease have been found in the water …
Infants born via c-section have a microbiome community composed mostly of skin bacteria [1-3], but the source of these skin bacteria is unknown. People quickly shed bacteria into their environment, leaving their own bacterial signature in a room within hours [4]. Do hospital operating rooms harbor skin bacteria that could colonize c-section delivered infants? A …
A number of cooling towers around the Bronx have been found to be the source of a Legionella outbreak. A number of buildings in the area tested positive for contamination, including a drug manufacturer (thankfully the medicine was not contaminated, at least according to the company representatives). Legionella is a waterborne pathogen that can grow in …
Just got sent this article (thanks Paula Olsiewski) “The Passive House in New York” which is an interesting article about the increasingly popular concept of passive houses. As the name suggests, passive houses maintain an appropriate ambient temperature without heating or cooling, mostly through airtights seals, a lot of insulation, and some sort of air exchange …
Great article about a great study. Read them both. Failing that, here’s my short version: A study entitled “Geospatial Resolution of Human and Bacterial Diversity with City-Scale Metagenomics” came out yesterday that is just fascinating on multiple levels. This article describes a large-scale metagenomics study carried out by the PathoMap project at Weill Cornell Medical …
Just found out about this really cool project: Pathomap | Mapping New York’s Unseen Residents. From the project page “Pathomap is a research project by Weill Cornell Medical College to study the microbiotic population and genetic dynamics in urban areas in order to detect and respond to escalated microbial dangers.” Basically, Chris Mason, along with collaborators, …