A Portrait of a Building and its External Inhabitants

Imagine a city skyline — what do you see?  Skyscraper peaks, metallic sheens, sand-colored stones, rusty brickreds, dirty white plaster, glinting windows?  That is a lot of surface area!  I am curious about what can be eking out a living on all of these different surfaces, and how it might be contributing to urban ecosystems. In …

Geography & Location admit to being kind of a big deal

This paper by John Chase and crew posted recently on PeerJ takes a deep look at the office microbiome composition and concludes that the biggest factors affecting differences in swabbed samples are the geography of the office and where the sample was taken inside it.  Their experiment showed minimal impact from other factors that are …

Some microbes may be good for your skin – so spray some on?

Have you heard of probiotics in cosmetics?  How about a bacterial mist?  A young company called Mother Dirt, with research partner AOBiome, sells a mist containing their now patented strain of Nitrosomonas bacteria (Nitrosomonas D23), an ammonia-oxidizer.   The species was cultured from the skin of one of the heads (or arm? leg?) of the company.  Here’s how …

Schizophrenia and the microbiome

Mental health and its possible relation to the microbiome is a controversial topic in today’s news. Here’s new research suggesting that schizophrenia may be linked to the oropharyngeal microbiome, as the study found “high-level differences” in bacteria of people diagnosed with the disorder and of those without. If true, this could add insight into the …