Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation IHBE Industry Consortium
How do you simulate the effect of daylight on indoor house dust in a controlled laboratory setting? By building homes for the dust, of course. The IHBE completed a pilot project, where we created “lightboxes” to look at the effect of natural light on bacterial communities in dust, separate from the microbial influences of human occupants or outdoor air. The boxes are each a single room, with single window covered by different filters to control the amount and type of daylight which shines on the dust inside. House dust was collected from a variety of different homes, and homogenized to create a single starting sample. Aliquots of that homogenized dust were dispensed into petri dishes inside the lightboxes, which were installed on a roof at the University of Oregon to catch natural daylight.
After this pilot study, we now have the start to a better understanding of the role of LED lighting and spectrum, as well as the circadian effect of light on microbes indoors.
