The Forum on Microbial Threats (Forum) was created in 1996 to address emerging, re-emerging, and novel infectious diseases and has become one of the leading places to address issues in microbial ecology and microbiology. The Forum gathers experts, develops agendas, conducts three meetings and two symposia per year, and publishes reports. Funds from this grant provide partial support to the Forum over a three-year period. Among the planned topics for future workshops and symposia is "The Movement of Microorganisms and the Microbial Ecology of the Built Environment", a workshop of interest to the Foundation's Microbiology of the Built Environment Program and one that will help set the stage for future efforts towards a full National Academies' study and report on the microbiology of built environments.

This grant supports efforts by Jill Banfield of the University of California, Berkeley and Michael Morowitz, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center 's Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh to study how premature infants-born sterile, separated from their mothers, and isolated in neonatal intensive care units" (NICUs)-nevertheless develop intestinal microbiota necessary for normal human digestion. Preliminary studies suggest that infants acquire the needed microbes from microbes in the NICU, and Banfield, Morowitz and their team will explore that hypothesis. They will conduct comprehensive, next generation high resolution ecological surveys of hospital air and surfaces to link them with microbial colonization of the infant GI tract. The project will involve building a mathematical model for simulating microbial transport within the NICU, which will be used to interpret collected date and make predictions about the efficacy of future interventions.

Funds from this grant support a research project by University of Chicago microbiologist Jack Gilbert and Chicago surgeon John Alverdy, to study microbial populations at a newly constructed hospital at the University of Chicago. By studying the characteristics of microbial populations before and after the hospital becomes operational, the project will shed light on how the introduction of doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors, staff change the microbes that live and thrive in hospital environments. Using a multidisciplinary team that includes microbial ecologists architects, building scientists, statisticians, and epidemiologists, Gilbert and Alverdy will take nearly 13,000 microbial samples and analyze them to investigate whether microbial community structure on hospital surfaces can be predicted by human demographics, physical conditions and/or building materials; how patient-room microbiota is influenced by the current patient, his length of stay, and/or the introduction of a new patient; how the colonization of surfaces by pathogens of surfaces is sped or impeded by existing microbial communities on those surfaces, and how the rate of change in a microbial community is affected by building materials and human use. The team plans to publish at least three articles on their research in peer-reviewed journals, and their findings may be of use to the health care community, leading to better patient care through crafting a more complete understanding of how microorganisms spread through hospitals.