Four principles for good indoor air: minimize indoor emissions, keep dry, ventilate, protect against outdoor pollution.

Bill Nazaroff has a seemingly simple – but quite detailed and very useful article worth reading for anyone interested in indoor air / indoor environments.  It was published September 13 in Indoor Air:  Four principles for achieving good indoor air quality. In the paper Nazaroff first discusses how “Everything should be made as simple as possible, …

New paper on interest from Rachel Adams et al. on bias in sequence-based surveys of indoor fungi

Checking out this new paper from Rachel Adams, Anthony Amend, John Taylor and Thomas Bruns: A Unique Signal Distorts the Perception of Species Richness and Composition in High-Throughput Sequencing Surveys of Microbial Communities: a Case Study of Fungi in Indoor Dust – Online First – Springer. It is open access so anyone out there can get …

New paper of interest: Monitoring Seasonal Changes in Winery-Resident Microbiota

Quick post here.  There is a new paper out of interest to the microBEnet community: PLOS ONE: Monitoring Seasonal Changes in Winery-Resident Microbiota.  From colleagues of mine at UC Davis it discusses culture independent surveys of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science Winery at UC Davis. I am running out the door or …

New EPA Report: Our Built and Natural Environments

A new report is out from the EPA: Our Built and Natural Environments: A Technical Review of the Interactions Between Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Quality 2nd Edition | Smart Growth | US EPA. This report has very little specifically about microbes but it does have a variety of things of relevance to the microBEnet community …

New open source software: FHiTING – tool for fungal ID from next-gen sequence data

Quick post.  There is a paper out from Jordan Peccia’s lab (authors Karen Dannemiller, Darryl Reeves, Kyle Bibby, Naomichi Yamamoto and Jordan Peccia) of potential interest: Fungal High-throughput Taxonomic Identification tool for use with Next-Generation Sequencing (FHiTINGS) –  The paper alas is not open access so I do not have access to it as I write …

New #PLOSPathogens paper: Asthma & the Diversity of Fungal Spores in Air

Of possible interest to studies of microbiology of the built environment is a new paper: PLOS Pathogens: Asthma and the Diversity of Fungal Spores in Air.  By Anne Pringle from Harvard University, the goal is summed up pretty well by the author With this primer, my aim is to facilitate communication by providing doctors with a …

Another genome from an uncultured microbe from a hospital sink biofilm #JCVI #Porphyromonas

Just wrote a post a few minutes ago about the sequencing and analysis of the genome(s) of representatives of the TM6 phylum of bacteria that were found in a hospital sink biofilm: First genome of TM6 — a novel phylum of bacteria — determined from a hospital sink sample. And lo and behold just realized there …

First genome of TM6 – a novel phylum of bacteria – determined from a hospital sink sample

Interesting new paper out from the J. Craig Venter Institute.  The paper is in PNAS: Candidate phylum TM6 genome recovered from a hospital sink biofilm provides genomic insights into this uncultivated phylum.  Thankfully it was published under the PNAS Open Access option so anyone / everyone has access to the paper.  In the paper the authors …

New paper on microbes in NICUs & how they change w/ cleaning & over time

A paper of potential interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd has just been published: Surface Microbes in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Changes with Routine Cleaning and Over Time.  From Nicholas Bokulich, David Mills and Mark Underwood at UC Davis it focuses on rRNA PCR based characterization of microbes (bacteria and fungi) on …

New paper on Comparing Bacteria in Houses vs. On People

There is a new paper of interest to the microbiology of the built environment crowd: Identification of Household Bacterial Community and Analysis of Species Shared with Human Microbiome.  Published June 7 in Current Microbiology by a group from South Korea, it details culture-based and culture-independent (i.e., rRNA PCR) comparisons of the bacteria found on fridges and …