MicrobiomeDigest – your daily fix of microbiome literature

Microbiomes are everywhere. Not only inside and around us, but also in the scientific literature. Not too many years ago, only a handful of microbiology laboratories were analyzing the composition of the invisible communities that surround us. Today, it feels as if every other scientist is doing something microbiome-related. New techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and …

New paper on diseased vs healthy infants in a NICU, possible impacts for future hospital microbiome work

This week in eLife, our lab published a study entitled Gut bacteria are rarely shared by co-hospitalized premature infants, regardless of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) development. Spearheaded by a talented Banfield Lab post-doc, Tali Raveh-Sadka, in collaboration with Michael Morowitz’s Lab, the study aimed to find the causative agent in an outbreak of NEC cases that …

Conclusions not totally convincing but hand microbiomes worth considering in hospital acquired infection studies

So – just was reading this paper: Healthcare Workers’ Hand Microbiome May Mediate Carriage of Hospital Pathogens.  Basically, they showed that the microbiome on health care worker’s hands was correlated with estimates of pathogen carriage. And, it seems to be of potential interest to the microBEnet community.  I confess, I am skeptical of the validity of some …

Toilet Ecology

Today, humans spend ~90% of their lives roaming the ‘great indoors’, which is very different from the outdoor environments where we co-evolved with our commensal microbiota (Kelley and Gilbert, 2013). We are just beginning to understand how the design of built environments (BEs) influences our microbiome, and how these interactions, in turn, might affect human …

Report on the Animals in the Built Environment Workshop

On October 7th and 8th 2014, we held a workshop at the University of California, Davis entitled Animals in the Built Environment. The aim of this workshop was to catalyze the study of the microbiology of built environments where animals live by bringing together experts in animal health, building science and microbiology to discuss why these systems are …

American Gut data and pipelines now freely available

While not exactly the microbiology of the built environment, studies of the human microbiome are the next closest thing and and understanding of both will be critical to creating healthier living environments. The American Gut project is the largest, crowdfunded/citizen science human microbiome effort, with over 3,000 participants so far (including myself).  In addition to …

Important paper on variation in bacterial communities on hands

There is an interesting and important paper out in Microbiology: Hand Bacterial Communities Vary Across Two Different Human Populations by Denina Hospodsky, Amy J. Pickering, Timothy R. Julian , Dana Miller, Sisira Gorthala, Alexandria B. Boehm, and Jordan Peccia.  This paper is important for many reasons including the following: They found significant variation in the communities found on …

The antibiotics that could kill you

“In 2010, Americans were prescribed 258 million courses of antibiotics, a rate of 833 per thousand people. Such massive usage, billions of doses, has been going on year after year.” or so says Martin Blaser who has written a book (“Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues” published by Macmillan …