“The Spread Of Hospital-Acquired Bacteria Revealed By Computational Methods”

Another short post here, this time on modeling the spread of hospital-acquired bacteria.  Horizontal gene transfer between bacteria is a huge problem in hospitals and these researchers have developed some models for how this process actually occurs in hospitals.    They’ve applied their techniques in a couple of real-life situations with interesting results.   They found for …

“Wrinkly coating can shimmy off bacteria” – Press release from Duke University

Short post here about a cool-sounding advance in materials science related to microbes in the built environment.    A research group at Duke University is working on a material that deforms in response to an electric current, thereby dislodging established biofilms (e.g. on the underside of a boat).   Hard to tell how likely this is since …

microBEnet documentary video of our first undergraduate research project

I haven’t talked a lot about this here, but in addition to the microBEnet website and conference organization we have been running a couple of undergraduate research projects related to the microbiology of the built environment. The first was a project started in January where a team of undergraduates isolated organisms from the built environment …