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Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias

Humans are exposed to diverse communities of microbes every day. With more time spent indoors by humans, investigations into the communities of microbes inhabiting occupied spaces have become important to deduce the impacts of these microbes on human health and building health. Studies so far have g...

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Autores principales: Davies, Lucy R., Barbero-López, Aitor, Lähteenmäki, Veli-Matti, Salonen, Antti, Fedorik, Filip, Haapala, Antti, Watts, Phillip C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10658902/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38025723
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16355
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author Davies, Lucy R.
Barbero-López, Aitor
Lähteenmäki, Veli-Matti
Salonen, Antti
Fedorik, Filip
Haapala, Antti
Watts, Phillip C.
author_facet Davies, Lucy R.
Barbero-López, Aitor
Lähteenmäki, Veli-Matti
Salonen, Antti
Fedorik, Filip
Haapala, Antti
Watts, Phillip C.
author_sort Davies, Lucy R.
collection PubMed
description Humans are exposed to diverse communities of microbes every day. With more time spent indoors by humans, investigations into the communities of microbes inhabiting occupied spaces have become important to deduce the impacts of these microbes on human health and building health. Studies so far have given considerable insight into the communities of the indoor microbiota humans interact with, but mainly focus on sampling surfaces or indoor dust from filters. Beneath the surfaces though, building envelopes have the potential to contain environments that would support the growth of microbial communities. But due to design choices and distance from ground moisture, for example, the temperature and humidity across a building will vary and cause environmental gradients. These microenvironments could then influence the composition of the microbial communities within the walls. Here we present a case study designed to quantify any patterns in the compositions of fungal and bacterial communities existing in a building envelope and determine some of the key variables, such as cardinal direction, distance from floor or distance from wall joinings, that may influence any microbial community composition variation. By drilling small holes across walls of a house, we extracted microbes onto air filters and conducted amplicon sequencing. We found sampling height (distance from the floor) and cardinal direction the wall was facing caused differences in the diversity of the microbial communities, showing that patterns in the microbial composition will be dependent on sampling location within the building. By sampling beneath the surfaces, our approach provides a more complete picture of the microbial condition of a building environment, with the significant variation in community composition demonstrating a potential sampling bias if multiple sampling locations across a building are not considered. By identifying features of the built environment that promote/retard microbial growth, improvements to building designs can be made to achieve overall healthier occupied spaces.
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spelling pubmed-106589022023-11-17 Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias Davies, Lucy R. Barbero-López, Aitor Lähteenmäki, Veli-Matti Salonen, Antti Fedorik, Filip Haapala, Antti Watts, Phillip C. PeerJ Microbiology Humans are exposed to diverse communities of microbes every day. With more time spent indoors by humans, investigations into the communities of microbes inhabiting occupied spaces have become important to deduce the impacts of these microbes on human health and building health. Studies so far have given considerable insight into the communities of the indoor microbiota humans interact with, but mainly focus on sampling surfaces or indoor dust from filters. Beneath the surfaces though, building envelopes have the potential to contain environments that would support the growth of microbial communities. But due to design choices and distance from ground moisture, for example, the temperature and humidity across a building will vary and cause environmental gradients. These microenvironments could then influence the composition of the microbial communities within the walls. Here we present a case study designed to quantify any patterns in the compositions of fungal and bacterial communities existing in a building envelope and determine some of the key variables, such as cardinal direction, distance from floor or distance from wall joinings, that may influence any microbial community composition variation. By drilling small holes across walls of a house, we extracted microbes onto air filters and conducted amplicon sequencing. We found sampling height (distance from the floor) and cardinal direction the wall was facing caused differences in the diversity of the microbial communities, showing that patterns in the microbial composition will be dependent on sampling location within the building. By sampling beneath the surfaces, our approach provides a more complete picture of the microbial condition of a building environment, with the significant variation in community composition demonstrating a potential sampling bias if multiple sampling locations across a building are not considered. By identifying features of the built environment that promote/retard microbial growth, improvements to building designs can be made to achieve overall healthier occupied spaces. PeerJ Inc. 2023-11-17 /pmc/articles/PMC10658902/ /pubmed/38025723 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16355 Text en ©2023 Davies et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Microbiology
Davies, Lucy R.
Barbero-López, Aitor
Lähteenmäki, Veli-Matti
Salonen, Antti
Fedorik, Filip
Haapala, Antti
Watts, Phillip C.
Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title_full Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title_fullStr Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title_full_unstemmed Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title_short Microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
title_sort microbes within the building envelope—a case study on the patterns of colonization and potential sampling bias
topic Microbiology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10658902/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38025723
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16355
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