579 research outputs found
Geography and Location Are the Primary Drivers of Office Microbiome Composition.
In the United States, humans spend the majority of their time indoors, where they are exposed to the microbiome of the built environment (BE) they inhabit. Despite the ubiquity of microbes in BEs and their potential impacts on health and building materials, basic questions about the microbiology of these environments remain unanswered. We present a study on the impacts of geography, material type, human interaction, location in a room, seasonal variation, and indoor and microenvironmental parameters on bacterial communities in offices. Our data elucidate several important features of microbial communities in BEs. First, under normal office environmental conditions, bacterial communities do not differ on the basis of surface material (e.g., ceiling tile or carpet) but do differ on the basis of the location in a room (e.g., ceiling or floor), two features that are often conflated but that we are able to separate here. We suspect that previous work showing differences in bacterial composition with surface material was likely detecting differences based on different usage patterns. Next, we find that offices have city-specific bacterial communities, such that we can accurately predict which city an office microbiome sample is derived from, but office-specific bacterial communities are less apparent. This differs from previous work, which has suggested office-specific compositions of bacterial communities. We again suspect that the difference from prior work arises from different usage patterns. As has been previously shown, we observe that human skin contributes heavily to the composition of BE surfaces. IMPORTANCE Our study highlights several points that should impact the design of future studies of the microbiology of BEs. First, projects tracking changes in BE bacterial communities should focus sampling efforts on surveying different locations in offices and in different cities but not necessarily different materials or different offices in the same city. Next, disturbance due to repeated sampling, though detectable, is small compared to that due to other variables, opening up a range of longitudinal study designs in the BE. Next, studies requiring more samples than can be sequenced on a single sequencing run (which is increasingly common) must control for run effects by including some of the same samples in all of the sequencing runs as technical replicates. Finally, detailed tracking of indoor and material environment covariates is likely not essential for BE microbiome studies, as the normal range of indoor environmental conditions is likely not large enough to impact bacterial communities
Three Principles for Realizing Mental Health: A New Psychospiritual View
KEYWORDS the three principles, Mind, Consciousness, Thought, innate mental health, spirituality, health realization, creativity in counseling In 1890, the founder of American psychology, William James, expressed the need for undergirding principles for psychology that represented true human natur
Microbial and metabolic succession on common building materials under high humidity conditions.
Despite considerable efforts to characterize the microbial ecology of the built environment, the metabolic mechanisms underpinning microbial colonization and successional dynamics remain unclear, particularly at high moisture conditions. Here, we applied bacterial/viral particle counting, qPCR, amplicon sequencing of the genes encoding 16S and ITS rRNA, and metabolomics to longitudinally characterize the ecological dynamics of four common building materials maintained at high humidity. We varied the natural inoculum provided to each material and wet half of the samples to simulate a potable water leak. Wetted materials had higher growth rates and lower alpha diversity compared to non-wetted materials, and wetting described the majority of the variance in bacterial, fungal, and metabolite structure. Inoculation location was weakly associated with bacterial and fungal beta diversity. Material type influenced bacterial and viral particle abundance and bacterial and metabolic (but not fungal) diversity. Metabolites indicative of microbial activity were identified, and they too differed by material
Ecological succession and viability of human-associated microbiota on restroom surfaces
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2014. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of American Society for Microbiology for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology (2014), doi:10.1128/AEM.03117-14.Human-associated bacteria dominate the built environment (BE). Following
decontamination of floors, toilet seats, and soap dispensers in 4 public restrooms, in situ
bacterial communities were characterized hourly, daily, and weekly to determine their
successional ecology. The viability of cultivable bacteria, following the removal of
dispersal agents (humans), was also assessed hourly. A late successional community
developed within 5-8 hours on restroom floors, and showed remarkable stability over
weeks to months. Despite late successional dominance by skin- and outdoor-associated
bacteria, the most ubiquitous organisms were predominantly gut-associated taxa, which
persisted following exclusion of humans. Staphylococcus represented the majority of the
cultivable community, even after several hours of human-exclusion. MRSA-associated
virulence genes were found on floors, but were not present in assembled Staphylococcus
pan-genomes. Viral abundances, which were predominantly enterophage, human
papilloma and herpes viruses, were significantly correlated with bacteria abundances, and
showed an unexpectedly low virus-to-bacteria ratio in surface-associated samples,
suggesting that bacterial hosts are mostly dormant on BE surfaces.S.M.G. was supported by an EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship and the National Institutes
of Health Training Grant 5T-32EB-009412. We acknowledge funding from the Alfred P
Sloan Foundation’s Microbiology of the Built Environment Program.2015-05-1
Sharing Emergency Planning Assumptions: Management Views Differ
Effective disaster management requires advanced planning. News media centers, public information hot-lines, and on-site volunteer procedures must be established in anticipation of large scale emergencies. In the following article, Kartez reviews the disaster planning programs and policies of 250 public agencies associated with disaster-prone communities. The study describes managerial perspectives of disaster planning policy. The article is a guide for planners concerned with the complexities of community crisis mitigation
Meteor Trail Advection Observed During the 1998 Leonid Shower
Sodium resonance lidar observations of meteor trails are reported from the 1998 Leonid shower experimental at the Starfire Optical Range Kirtland Air Force Base, NM (35.0Âş N, 106.5Âş W ). The lidar was operating in a spatially scanning mode that allowed tracking for up to one half-hour. Three trails are presented here whose motion allowed inference of radial as well as vector wind components and apparent diffusivities. The winds are derived independently using the narrow linewidth sodium (Na) resonance Doppler lidar technique and are compared with the tracking results
Low Energy Thresholds and the Renormalization Group in the MSSM
We derive the 1-loop Renormalization Group Equations for the parameters of
the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) taking into account the
successive decoupling of each sparticle below its threshold. This is realized
by a step function at the level of each graph contributing to the
Renormalization Group Equations.Comment: 10 pages , Latex, no figure
Impact of Gravel Dredging Operations on Surface Water Quality in Streams in the Upper Cumberland Basin
This is a report to the USEPA, Kentucky Division of Water and the Kentucky Water Resources Research Institute, focused on the biologic and morphological impacts of gravel mining in the upper Cumberland basin
- …