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Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence

SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Airflows sustain the infection spread, and in densely urbanized areas airborne particulate matters (PMs) are deemed to aggravate the viral transmission. Apis mellifera colonies are used as bioindicators as they allow environmental sampling of diff...

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Autores principales: Cilia, Giovanni, Bortolotti, Laura, Albertazzi, Sergio, Ghini, Severino, Nanetti, Antonio
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8438869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34543793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150327
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author Cilia, Giovanni
Bortolotti, Laura
Albertazzi, Sergio
Ghini, Severino
Nanetti, Antonio
author_facet Cilia, Giovanni
Bortolotti, Laura
Albertazzi, Sergio
Ghini, Severino
Nanetti, Antonio
author_sort Cilia, Giovanni
collection PubMed
description SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Airflows sustain the infection spread, and in densely urbanized areas airborne particulate matters (PMs) are deemed to aggravate the viral transmission. Apis mellifera colonies are used as bioindicators as they allow environmental sampling of different nature, PMs included. This experiment demonstrates for the first time the possible use of honey bee colonies in the SARS-CoV-2 monitoring. The trial was conducted in Bologna on 18 March 2021, when the third wave of the Italian pandemic was at its peak and environmental conditions allowed high PM concentrations in the air. Sterile swabs were lined up at the hive entrance to sample the dusty material on the body of returning foragers. All of them resulted positive for the target genes of viral SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Likewise, internal samples were taken, but they resulted in no amplification of the target sequences. This experiment does not support speculations about the role of honey bees or their products in SARS-CoV-2 transmission. However, it indicates a novel use of A. mellifera colonies in the environmental detection of airborne human pathogens, at least in a densely urbanized area, deserving better understanding and possible integration with data from automatic air samplers.
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spelling pubmed-84388692021-09-14 Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence Cilia, Giovanni Bortolotti, Laura Albertazzi, Sergio Ghini, Severino Nanetti, Antonio Sci Total Environ Article SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Airflows sustain the infection spread, and in densely urbanized areas airborne particulate matters (PMs) are deemed to aggravate the viral transmission. Apis mellifera colonies are used as bioindicators as they allow environmental sampling of different nature, PMs included. This experiment demonstrates for the first time the possible use of honey bee colonies in the SARS-CoV-2 monitoring. The trial was conducted in Bologna on 18 March 2021, when the third wave of the Italian pandemic was at its peak and environmental conditions allowed high PM concentrations in the air. Sterile swabs were lined up at the hive entrance to sample the dusty material on the body of returning foragers. All of them resulted positive for the target genes of viral SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Likewise, internal samples were taken, but they resulted in no amplification of the target sequences. This experiment does not support speculations about the role of honey bees or their products in SARS-CoV-2 transmission. However, it indicates a novel use of A. mellifera colonies in the environmental detection of airborne human pathogens, at least in a densely urbanized area, deserving better understanding and possible integration with data from automatic air samplers. Elsevier B.V. 2022-01-20 2021-09-14 /pmc/articles/PMC8438869/ /pubmed/34543793 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150327 Text en © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Cilia, Giovanni
Bortolotti, Laura
Albertazzi, Sergio
Ghini, Severino
Nanetti, Antonio
Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title_full Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title_fullStr Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title_full_unstemmed Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title_short Honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental SARS-CoV-2 occurrence
title_sort honey bee (apis mellifera l.) colonies as bioindicators of environmental sars-cov-2 occurrence
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8438869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34543793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150327
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