Microbial communities living inside buildings and rooms are important for human health. Another aspect is production rooms for specific products, e.g. food, pharmaceuticals, space crafts etc. or hospitals, in which sterility is required. However, what means sterility in rooms and how much sterility is really necessary? It is widely recognized that the majority of microorganisms cannot be readily cultivated and thus, the overall diversity of microorganisms associated with indoor environments remains largely unknown. The new molecular and microscopic techniques such as high-throughput sequencing and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) have opened the black box of indoor microbial communities and revealed a high diversity of archaea, bacteria and fungi. Human-associated microbes are commonly found especially on surfaces suggesting that bacterial pathogens could readily be transmitted between individuals. The new techniques and bioinformatic tools also allowed the evaluation of concepts for hygiene and sterility. In this round table, new insights into indoor microbiology for different environments such as living space or clean rooms for spacecraft assembly and intensive care units will be presented (e.g. Moissl-Eichinger 2010; Kembel et al. 2012; both ISME J). Furthermore, efficient management strategies and new possibilities to (biologically) control these microorganisms into a beneficial direction will be discussed.
Bacterial diversity within the home environment
Noah Fierer, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA
Microbiology in clean rooms and planetary protection
Christine Moissl-Eichinger, University of Regensburg, Germany
Microbiology in Intensive Care Units
Lisa Oberauner, Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology, Austria
New possibilities to manage indoor microbial communities
Stefan Liebminger, Research Center Pharmaceutical Engineering
(RCPE GmbH) and Bio2clean, Austria
Discussion (Berg & All): new methods in indoor microbiology, how
much sterility is possible, new concept for hygiene and control