Ten questions concerning the microbiomes of buildings

By R. Adams, S. Bhangar, K. Dannemiller, Jonathan A. Eisen, Noah Fierer, Jack A. Gilbert, Jessica L. Green, Linsey C. Marr, Shelly L. Miller, J. Siegel and 3 more. 2016

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Buildings represent habitats for microorganisms that can have direct or indirect effects on the quality of our living spaces, health, and well-being. Over the last ten years, new research has employed sophisticated tools, including DNA sequencing-based approaches, to study microbes found in buildings and the overall built environment. These investigations have catalyzed new insights into and questions about the microbes that surround us in our daily lives. The emergence of the “microbiology of the built environment” field has required bridging disciplines, including microbiology, ecology, building science, architecture, and engineering. Early insights have included a fuller characterization of sources of microbes within buildings, important processes that structure the distributions and abundances of microbes, and a greater appreciation of the role that occupants can have on indoor microbiology. This ongoing work has also demonstrated that traditional culture- and microscopy-based approaches for studying microbiology vastly underestimate the types and quantity of microbes present in environmental samples. We offer ten questions that highlight important lessons learned regarding the microbiology of buildings and suggest future areas of investigation.

Subfields: Conservation, Earth-Surface Processes, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a25158e1cb304f7a381f660878cd6278af1d8f2a

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Cody J. Beemer
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Lisa A. Brenner

Citations in the corpus

Ten questions concerning the built environment and mental health (2019, background): “The microbiome of the built environment (MoBE) has been increasingly studied in the past decade, recently summarized in a report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [120] and included as another Ten Questions article series [121].”