New papers on Microbiology of the Built Environment, November 19, 2016

Microbes in the city Microbial Community Patterns Associated with Automated Teller Machine Keypads in New York City – Holly M. Bik – mSphere (OA). News coverage at EurekAlert, ScienceDaily, and NYMagazine. (…) Here we carried out a baseline study of automated teller machine (ATM) keypads in New York City (NYC). Our goal was to describe …

Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals? (NOVA Online)

Great article from Brooke Borel writing for NOVA Online, “Manipulating the Unseen Microbial Ecosystem–The Future of Hospitals?”. This covers some of the background of microbiology in hospitals, discusses work by both the BioBE Center and microBEnet… and of course the Hospital Microbiome Project as well as the NICU study from Jill Banfield’s lab.  The article …

Studying – not wantonly killing – the microbes around us and the rise of the “microbiology of the built environment”

Imagine you have a camera with a special “anti-macro” lens.  This lens scrubs from any image all plants and animals and other “macro” organisms.  And this lens also highlights  the remaining living things – the microorganisms – anywhere in the frame (including those that were in or on the macro organisms removed from the image). …

Microbiome of the NICU Resembles that of Premature Infants

We know that human babies born through vaginal birth are colonized by their mother’s microbes but what about the case of premature infants? A paper published by Jill Banfield and colleagues as part of a Sloan-funded project investigates the connection between microbial communities of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and those of the premature infant gut. Premature infants …

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 …