Excerpts from an interview with Jason Stajich from UC Riverside.

Complete video interview can be seen here.  

Question: How did you become interested in microbiology of the built environment?

Jason: I got interested because I was approached by some folks that were working in this area. In part the Sloan Foundation was interested in helping to develop a data coordinating center for the data that will be generated through analysis and sequencing of the micro biome of the built environment. I was introduced that way and I have been very interested to learn more about the questions that people are asking in this field.

Question: Can you tell us a bit about the current projects you are working on?

Jason: Our aspects are focusing on the data-coordinating center focusing on fungi. Our lab studies fungi primarily and we are trying the help build better tools and better interfaces for researches to be able to analyze their sequences of the micro biome of the built environment. We are hoping that these tools will be very useful for researches who aren't experts in this type of analysis.

Question:  What is your favorite aspect or approach of studying the built environment?

Jason: I think my favorite aspect is learning more about what actually lives inside buildings in the sense that we don't really have a good inventory of that yet. So understanding the dynamics of the organisms that are living inside, how they cycle or turnover, as well as understanding what's the difference between a building that is healthy where people aren't getting sick and buildings where we do have people that are coming down with illnesses. So trying to peel away the layers of that has been really quite interesting to me.

Question: What's one big question right now in the microbiology of the built environment community?

Jason: I think one of the challenges is that we don't have a lot of the tools yet to be able to analyze the fungi that are as well developed as the bacterial tools. So I think one of the big challenges is being able to make the databases more useful for studying and identifying those organisms. And in part that is to help us understand, as I said before, the difference between a building where people are sick, and buildings where people are healthy.  Maybe we can understand what the organisms that are there naturally or organisms that are introduced through different human activities and how those impact the health of the occupants. So, I think that's the big questions that we would like to understand better. You can certainly go into a building and smell mold and realize that there is something wrong. But do we really understand what are the organisms that are contributing to that?