Funds from this grant support MoBE 2017, a two-day Microbiology of the Built Environment Research and Applications Symposium to be held October 11–12, 2017 at the U.S. National Academies in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the symposium is to engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders by highlighting research findings, identifying intersections with stakeholder missions, and showcasing a National Academies consensus study, Microbiomes of the Built Environment: From Research to Application, which documents the state of knowledge on the microbiome/built environment interface, identifies knowledge gaps, and sets out a list of prioritized areas for future research. Each day of the symposium will include one keynote speaker and four themed sessions. Topics to be discussed include the nexus of microbial exposure and building design, public health and indoor microbial communities, manipulating microbiome composition through architectural choices and material selection, and potential applications of indoor microbial research. A total of 160 guests are expected, including researchers, journalists, industry representatives, and policymakers from state, federal, and international government bodies. MoBE 2017 promises to be an important capstone event for the Foundation’s MoBE program as we near the end of planned grantmaking in 2017. If successful, it will engage and inform potential funders and community stakeholders from government agencies, philanthropic organizations, and companies, while celebrating the scientific achievements of the program.

There are nearly 600,000 portable classrooms across the country. These “temporary” structures are plagued with problems: poor ventilation, water intrusion, high levels of formaldehyde, and insufficient building maintenance. The problems are particularly worrisome given that recent studies have shown that poor indoor air quality can reduce cognitive performance. This grant funds a team led by Professor Kerry Kinney at the University of Texas, Austin, to construct a case study examining how “hidden spaces” in a temporary-yet-permanent building influence the indoor microbiome. Hidden spaces like ceiling plenums and crawl spaces can be important vectors for the spread of microbes indoors. Dark, moist, and infrequently cleaned, such spaces often contain high levels of contaminants, which may subsequently be spread throughout the building by drafts. Studying actual portable classrooms, Kinney and her team plan to identify where microbes and other contaminants come from and where they go within classroom and hidden spaces, and then determine how positive and negative pressurization from ventilation systems affects the microbiota and other contaminants in various parts of the portable classroom The researchers will share their findings by publishing in building science, life science, and trade journals; in web posts; and by using social media to direct readers to these postings. The team will also make presentations at national and international meetings. Both a graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow will be trained in indoor microbiome and building science studies during the research.

Urban transportation systems have been studied as vectors for the transmission of infectious disease, but their role in moving harmless microbes among hosts is largely unknown. This grant funds a project by Curtis Huttenhower, associate professor of computational biology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate member of the Broad Institute, to determine the metabolic activity of host- and environmentally derived microbes in the public transportation microbiome and reconstruct associated biochemical pathways. Huttenhower’s study will determine the degree to which transit-associated microbial communities are functionally active as well as the basic microbial biochemical processes by which they persist in situ and (re-) transmit to and from human hosts. The team plans to share functional data and metadata through open access repositories. Manuscripts will be made open access whenever possible, and all software will be made freely available open source commensurate with the lab's existing work. The team expects to publish at least two papers and present the work at two conferences.

This grant provides partial support for a longitudinal study of the microbiomes of dormitories and their inhabitants at the U.S. Air Force Academy (USAFA). Over the course of nine weeks, a University of Colorado research team led by principal investigator Christopher Lowry and Lt. Col. Andrew Hoisington will sample indoor and outdoor surfaces at USAFA dormitories, characterize environmental conditions, and take skin and stool samples from a cohort of 48 U.S. Air Force cadets. Samples will then be analyzed to determine the degree to which the dorm room locations of cadets and their interactions with each other influence the microbial profiles of the cadets and their dorm rooms. The uniformity of the dorm room construction and the unique standardization in diet, lifestyle, and age among cadets makes them a particularly attractive target for study that will maximize researchers’ ability to detect confounding factors that impact host-derived microbial colonization of the dormitories. The team plans to share its findings through conference presentations, open access peer-reviewed publications, social media, and websites. The team also plans a symposium to share findings and discuss how current and future research directions in human and built environment microbiomes might advance the aims of the Department of Defense.

This grant supports two additional years of research by a team at the Berkeley Indoor Microbial Research Consortium, which aims to expand our understanding of the microbial ecology of the built environment as mediated by interactions among organisms, particulate matter, and volatile and nonvolatile chemicals. Under the direction of principal investigator (PI) Thomas Bruns, professor of plant and microbial ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, the proposed work plan is organized around four objectives: Build an integrated understanding of the role of occupancy and occupant behaviors on bioaerosols and microbially derived chemical emissions in residential environments. The biological measurements will be made in collaboration with the Berkeley Chemistry of Indoor Environments (CIE) team (see Berkeley CIE proposal) as part of the intensive field campaign taking place in one-to-two residences. Characterize the chemistry of biological interactions among microorganisms on residential indoor surfaces, incorporating both mVOC measurements and the study of nonvolatile chemical compounds, as measured through nanospray desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (NanoDESI MS). Determine the metabolic state and activity of indoor microbes. Develop improved methods for sampling and assaying microbial communities in built environments. Research findings will be shared through peer-reviewed publications, presentations at conferences and meetings, and through blogs on microBE.net. At least three postdoctoral fellows will be trained in the course of the project.

Drinking water regulations focus on the quality of the water coming out of the water treatment plant, but water can pick up bacteria and other microbes as it travels from the plant to the faucet.  Since 2012, the Foundation has supported researchers at Virginia Tech to characterize the plumbing microbiome and how it affects the microbial profile of household water. This two-year grant continues Foundation support for this work.  Professors Amy Pruden and Marc Edwards at Virginia Tech have designed a series of experiments to explore how warm (30°C) ambient water temperatures and use of recycled water influence the building plumbing microbiome. Over the next two years, they will use complementary batch and continuous flow experiments to study how water temperature affects abundance and diversity among bacteria and amoebae in household water and whether recycled water’s distinct chemistry (relative to potable water) causes greater proliferation of bacteria and free-living amoebae in bulk water and biofilms. The Virginia Tech team will share their findings through peer-reviewed papers and presentations at national and international conferences and through blog posts and other social media. The sequence data will be deposited in public databases. At least one student and two postdoctoral fellows will be trained under the grant.

With Foundation support, a team led by Jillian Banfield at the University of California, Berkeley has been investigating how preterm infants, taken from their mothers at birth and placed in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), nonetheless acquire the microbes that will become their human microbiome. Initial findings suggest microbes from the “sterile” NICU itself colonize the infants. This grant supports the continuation of Banfield’s work for an additional three years. Banfield hypothesizes that certain forms of microbial life can survive in NICU environments for months or years, travel from room to room by riding on nurses’ clothing, and eventually become incorporated into infant gut, oral, or skin microbiomes. To test these hypotheses, Banfield and her team will track three rooms and their occupants in the NICU of the Magee-Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA over two years. Using advanced metagenomic techniques, the team will identify persistent, room‐adapted strains of microbes living in the NICU, identify which of these strains successfully colonize infant patients, and quantify the transfer of microbes via bioaerosols and travel vectors such as nurses’ uniforms. The team will share their findings through journal publications, presentations at national and international conferences, and through blogs on microBE.net.