SEP 08, 2016 10:30 AM PDT

The Serious Science of Schmutz: Deep-sequencing the built environment

Speaker

Abstract

The global trend towards industrialization and urbanization has led to ever more people living and working indoors. Some studies estimate that humans in industrialized countries spend as much as 90% of their lives inside. Thus, for billions of humans the built environment (BE) now represents the modern ecological habitat of Homo sapiens sapiens. In this talk, I will review our groundbreaking studies using molecular tools and bioinformatics to explore BEs such as therapy pools, offices, hospitals and airplanes. I will then discuss our experimental time-series 16S and metagnomic analysis of bacterial and viral community that demonstrated rapid ecological succession and stabilization of communities on restroom surface. Finally, I will describe the SourceTracker program, inspired by our BE studies, which determines how many different communities have contributed to contaminated environment.


SEP 08, 2016 10:30 AM PDT

The Serious Science of Schmutz: Deep-sequencing the built environment