Metagenomics of toilet waste from long distance flights

I just saw this paper, published a couple of days ago in Nature’s Scientific Reports. And yeah, it’s open access! While reading this post, I would suggest playing Dalai Lama by Rammstein, the in-flight version of Der Erlkönig. Meta-genomic analysis of toilet waste from long distance flights; a step towards global surveillance of infectious diseases and antimicrobial …

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 …

Yes, there are microbes everywhere. Even on your cell phone. Toilets get a bad rap.

One of our pet peeves are the oft-repeated microbiology stories in the media that consist of “OMG we found bacteria on your chair/house/keyboard/dishwasher/cell phone/toys/books/doorknobs/dusters/vacuum cleaners/”.  There are three issues with this kind of story;  firstly that bacteria are everywhere so no shockers about finding them on your cell phone.  Secondly, most of these stories focus …

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 …

Beneficial bacteria in urinals

Another cool example of using beneficial microbes in the indoor environment… in this case using Bacillus strains to reduced odors in pub urinals.  The company (CBIO) that markets this device called the “Clearinator” also has other neat sounding microbial-based devices such as the “Bactaerator” and the “Baccelerator”. Pretty simple really, they find bacterial strains that …

Nice title: A glimpse under the rim — the composition of microbial biofilm communities in domestic toilets

OK, so the article is a few years old (and not open access) but it should win a prize for best/worst title in a recent paper on indoor microbiology:  A glimpse under the rim — the composition of microbial biofilm communities in domestic toilets – Egert – 2009 – Journal of Applied Microbiology I note …