New Sloan-funded program in microbiology of built environment: Jill Banfield, ICU microbiome and infant gut microbiome

The second new project to receive funding from the Sloan foundation is a project entitled “Analysis of the ICU room environment as a source of microorganisms colonizing the GI tract of premature infants”.  This project is being managed by Jill Banfield at UC Berkeley, along with her Co-PIs; Michael Morowitz (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine) …

New Sloan-funded project in microbiology of the built environment – Jack Gilbert, Hospital Microbiome study

The Sloan Foundation has just announced funding for another two projects, we’ll be posting details here. The first project is called the “Hospital Microbiome Study” and will be managed by Jack Gilbert (University of Chicago) and Captain Benjamin Kirkup at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.  Check out the project website here.

Aerosol transmission of bacteria in a simulated hospital setting (they go far)

Heard about an interesting paper today (sadly not open access) describing airflow simulations in an aerosol chamber.  Basically they showed that if you release bugs from a mannequin, they spread all over the room… up to 3.5 meters away.   A worthwhile study, but not something that wasn’t known already.    What made this get so much …

New undergraduate research project in the built environment (aquariums) at UC Davis

Last year as part of microBEnet’s mandate to perform outreach associated with the microbiology of the built environment we sponsored and managed an undergraduate research project.   In this we isolated organisms from the built environment and then sequenced several reference genomes.  This work is currently being prepared in a series of genome announcement publications. (see …

New study on bacterial diversity in hospitals

Quick post here about a study that came out last month “Exploring Bacterial Diversity in Hospital Environments by GS-FLX Titanium Pyrosequencing” by Poza et al in Madrid. These authors used 454 sequencing of 16S to survey bacterial populations in the entrance hall and the ICU of a hospital in Madrid.   Not surprisingly, they found lower …

“Mechanisms by Which Ambient Humidity May Affect Viruses in Aerosols” new paper from Linsey Marr’s group

An interesting review article from Linsey Marr’s group at Virginia Tech looking at the various factors that might influence virion survival in aerosols.   Abstract below: Many airborne viruses have been shown to be sensitive to ambient humidity, yet the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon remain elusive. We review multiple hypotheses, including water activity, surface inactivation, …

Lake Arrowhead Microbial Genomics Meeting 2012: Microbiology of the Built Environment Session

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 …