Jonathan Eisen was part of a live discussion this week on the popular
Forum show, a public affairs program that airs on KQED public radio. Hosted by Mina Kim, the show discussed a new study of personal microbiomes published in the journal PeerJ (
Humans differ in their personal microbial cloud).
Professor Eisen joined James Meadow, the lead author of the aforementioned study, and Nick Stockton (a science writer for Wired) to discuss the implications of this work. Jonathan began by reflecting on the wide distribution of microbes in the environment:
"All systems: all plants, all animals, the soil, the water, and buildingsâ¦there's a cloud of microbes in those environments. We haven't paid a lot of attention to any of these microbes other than the ones that make us sick, or make our plants and animals sick in some way. But it turns out that there's a cloud everywhere. What exactly that cloud is doing and how it moves around, and how it affects us, is what a lot of people are interested in now."
Jonathan Eisen, 2015-09-25
Professor Eisen's research interests in this field can be explored in more detail on
his lab's web site, or at the
microbiology of the Built Environment network (microBEnet) website, a project that Jonathan is actively involved in. The full discussion can be listened to on the KQED website:
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