Aeolian Prokaryotic Communities of the Global Dust Belt Over the Red Sea

Abstract

Aeolian prokaryotic communities (APC) are important components of bioaerosols that are transported freely or attached to dust particles suspended in the atmosphere. Terrestrial and marine ecosystems are known to release and receive significant prokaryote loads into and from the surrounded atmospheric air. However, compared to terrestrial systems, there is a lack of microbial characterization of atmospheric dust over marine systems, such as the Red Sea, which receives significant terrestrial dust loads and is centrally located within the Global Dust Belt. Prokaryotic communities are likely to be particularly important in the Global Dust Belt, the area between the west coast of North Africa and Central Asia that supports the highest dust fluxes on the planet. Here we characterize the diversity and richness of the APC over the Red Sea ecosystem, the only sea fully contained within the Global Dust Belt. MiSeq sequencing was used to target 16S ribosomal DNA of two hundred and forty aeolian dust samples. These samples were collected at ∼7.5 m high above the sea level at coastal and offshore sampling sites over a 2-year period (2015–2017). The sequencing outcomes revealed that the APC in the atmospheric dust is dominated by Proteobacteria (42.69%), Firmicutes (41.11%), Actinobacteria, (7.69%), and Bacteroidetes (3.49%). The dust-associated prokaryotes were transported from different geographical sources and found to be more diverse than prokaryotic communities of the Red Sea surface water. Marine and soil originated prokaryotes were detected in APC. Hence, depending on the season, these groups may have traveled from other distant sources during storm events in the Red Sea region, where the APC structure is influenced by the origin and the concentration of aeolian dust particles. Accordingly, further studies of the impact of atmospheric organic aerosols on the recipient environments are required.

Airborne Bacterial Community Composition According to Their Origin in Tenerife, Canary Islands

“…Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria abundances were more variable throughout the year and did not show a clear trend. Other frequent phyla previously described in air samples, such as Acidobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Chloroflexi, or Deinococcus-Thermus (Kellogg et al, 2004;Gao et al, 2017;Aalismail et al, 2020), were identified in less than 1% of the sequences in this study. Generally, summer samples showed the highest abundance levels at both sampling sites, similar to trends observed in previous reports (Bowers et al, 2012;Bertolini et al, 2013;Genitsaris et al, 2017;Núñez et al, 2021), but the highest number of unique OTUs for a given season corresponded to winter in this study.…”

“…Most of the relevant literature has reported similar findings. Proteobacteria is regularly the most frequent phylum in airborne samples ( Cáliz et al, 2018 ; Aalismail et al, 2020 ). However, percentages obtained here are significantly higher (>65%) than those of most previous studies (25–51%) ( Tringe et al, 2008 ; Barberan et al, 2014 ; Prussin et al, 2016 ; Abd Aziz et al, 2018 ; Tanaka et al, 2019 ; Uetake et al, 2019 ).…”

The Red Sea Fisheries - Threats and Proposed Solutions

“…So, the dusts play key roles in nutrients enrichments that may support biological productivity. Meantime, the global dust belt bears heavy loads of microbes, virus, and bacteria cells that discharge over the LME # 33 (Aalismail et al, 2020) especially over the southern region and during summer season (Osipov & Stenchikov, 2018).…”

Marine bacterial enrichment in the sea surface microlayer, and surface taxa aerosolization potential in the Western Mediterranean Sea

“…1, S4). This might be due to the Mediterranean bacteria's capacity to rapidly respond to dust input (Tsiola et al, 2017, Dinasquet et al, 2022, especially in the SSML (Astrahan et al, 2016) or to the direct deposition of dust attached bacteria (Rahav et al, 2016, Mescioglu et al, 2019, Aalismail et al, 2020 to the SSML.…”