University of Oregon research on microbial communities in 72 homes

The University of Oregon published this announcement on AAAS’ EurekAlert: Oregon architecture researchers to study indoor air quality in 72 homes. So a good song to play while reading this post would be: “Portland, Oregon” ‌‌by Loretta Lynn & Jack White. The press release starts off with a short summary of this project: University of Oregon researchers and industry partners …

Breaking down human emissions

Microbiology of the Built Environment research these recent years have explored how humans are a source of microbes and microbial products indoors. To further study the effect of human occupancy on the biological aerosols of indoor space, our research group at Berkeley decided to move from observation studies to controlled experiments to isolate – and quantify – this …

Last Chance to Be Koalafied!

My name is Katie Dahlhausen and I am A PhD student in Jonathan’s lab. I am crowd-funding a project to study this fascinating koala biology, as well as investigate alternative infectious disease treatment where antibiotics are not a viable option. Want to help out these adorable critters? You can support the Indiegogo campaign here, which …

Call for Papers! Microbiome special issue on the Microbiology of the Built Environment

Just a quick plug: Jack Gilbert and I are guest-editing a special issue in Microbiome dedicated to Microbiology of the Built Environment. We are now accepting original research, methods, and software article submissions to be considered for the special issue (planned for publication in late 2015). We are looking specifically for work that involves multiple aspects of the …

Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 2

  Back in October 2013 I wrote a blog post here called “Building science measurements in the Hospital Microbiome Project: Part 1” where I described the types of building environmental and operational measurements we were making at the time as part of Jack Gilbert’s Sloan-funded Hospital Microbiome Project (Jeff Siegel at the University of Toronto also played a …

Sloan Foundation at Healthy Buildings 2015 America

Greetings from the Healthy Buildings Conference Committee! We are excited to be hosting Healthy Buildings 2015 America in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado Boulder. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products, and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on …

Open Source Building Science Sensors

This is just a quick post to introduce some early work products resulting from a really exciting project my team has been working on: the Open Source Building Science Sensors (OSBSS) Project (funded by the Sloan Foundation). The goal of OSBSS is to to design and develop a network of inexpensive, open source devices based on …

Comparing the new 16S rRNA V4 and ITS primers to the old primers-RESULTS!

The Knight lab has been working hard testing new primers for 16S rRNA amplicon production and its time to share our progress. So far, the 16S rRNA V4 region forward primer (designated 515f) has been paired with five different reverse primers (806r, 926r, 967r, 1048r, and 1391r) to amplify ribosomal RNA from bacteria, Archaea, and …