Ecology and Ecosystems

Biography

Biography: Elena S Gusareva

Abstract

Our understanding of airborne microbial communities including their sources, functions, microbial interplay and ecology is limited despite its relevance for human health, environmental and ecosystems functioning. Few attempts have been made to study air microbial ecosystems to date. Tropical environments, distinct from temperate northern hemisphere systems studied so far, have specific physical/chemical features that impact the structure, function and ecology of the microbial components of their air ecosystems. Moreover, a highly urbanized ecosystem with its unique built environment and extensively processed indoor air, as encountered in Singapore, likely harbors defined yet unknown microbial communities.

To comprehensively describe air-borne microbial ecosystem of Singapore, triplicates air samples were collected within 24 hours for 5 consecutive days in four independent experiments. We used filter-based high volume air sampling instruments to generate samples used for subsequent DNA extraction. A cultivation-free metagenomics next generation sequencing (NGS) was adopted to identify microbial taxa to species level. The air-borne microbial community was found to be remarkably stable with recurrence intervals of high microbial abundance in the dark hours and relatively low abundance in the light hours. Air samples were dominated by DNA of basidiomycota fungi and less frequently of Ascomycota fungi phylum. The microbial air ecosystem was mostly modulated by day/ night Biorhythms, temperature fluctuations and rain events. This is one of the highest-resolution researches currently undertaken on
any air microbiome and its ecology, worldwide.