French archive employees handling moldy documents were found to be more likely to experience headaches, fatigue, eye or throat irritation, coughing, and rhinorrhea (stuffy nose) than their co-workers breathing the same air but not handling moldy documents . The culture and qPCR-based analysis of air samples showed Penicillium chrysogenum, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, and Aspergillus versicolor were …
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 …
Just a short post here about an interesting paper that came out a few weeks ago (not open access, here’s the press release). This group showed that the bacterial protein flagellin can exacerbate allergic reactions to house dust (at least in mice). What’s interesting to me is that flagellin itself is not an allergen, it …
Quick post here. For those of you who eat or cook poultry this may interest you: Why you shouldn’t wash chicken before cooking – The Times of India. The article discusses the results of a survey done by News.com.au on whether people wash their poultry before cooking it. Seems that this is quite common in some places. …
Here’s a case of where an interesting piece of basic science, gets written up as a press release that reaches a bit too far, in particular using a headline like “Reason discovered for the toxicity of indoor mould”. That headline is a big stretch from the original article title which was “20-Residue and 11-residue peptaibols …
Rob Dunn of North Carolina State University has written a charming and fascinating piece on the microbes that inhabit our belly buttons. You can find it here on the Scientific American blog site (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/11/07/after-two-years-scientists-still-cant-solve-belly-button-mystery-continue-navel-gazing/). I strongly recommend it for the skill of his writing as well as the extremely interesting insights into the microbes in …
One of the problems I’ve faced as a microbiologist attempting to learn about the built environment is the incredible amount of snake oil and pseudoscience that swirls around the edges of the field. There’s a huge body of solid, peer-reviewed research in the field of course. But there’s a lot of company-sponsored pseudoscience out there …
Well this is both weird and very interesting: 3D houses “grown” like bones | SmartPlanet. Sort of a combination of 3D printing, bioinspired design, and architecture. Not sure what the future of this is but if they want to have walls that grow / respond to stresses they could consider making them actually alive. Maybe it …
Just a short post here about a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Detected at Four U.S. Wastewater Treatment Plants” Unlike some of the stories we rag on about potential pathogens in the built environment (things like “we found E. coli!”), there is a real concern about finding MRSA in …
Not sure what to make of this still but it certainly is a case of microbes in the built environment: Living Concrete Fixes Its Own Cracks With Built-in Bacteria. Not sure why the Malaysian Digest is covering this but it still intrigues me and thought it might be of interest.