Derived ecological niches of indoor microbes are crucial for asthma symptoms in university dormitories

Abstract

Increasing evidences from home environment indicate that microbiome community is associated with asthma. However, indoor microbiome composition can be highly diverse and dynamic, and thus current studies fail to produce consistent association. Chinese university dormitories are special high-density dwellings with a standard built environment and personal characteristics for occupants, which can be used to disentangle the complex interactions between microbes, environmental characteristics and asthma.Settled air dust and floor dust was collected from 87 dormitory rooms in Shanxi University. Bacterial community was characterized by 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing. Students (n = 357) were surveyed for asthma symptoms.Asthma symptoms were not associated with the overall bacterial richness, but associated with different phylogenetic classes. Taxa richness and abundance in Clostridia and Bacteroidia were positively associated with asthma (p < 0.05), and these taxa were mainly derived from human gut. Taxa richness (p < 0.1) and abundance (p < 0.05) in Alphaproteobacteria and Actinobacteria were protectively associated with asthma, and these taxa were mainly derived from outdoor environment. Building age, floor and curtain cleaning frequency shaped the overall bacterial community of air dust (p < 0.05). Frequent curtain cleaning increased the relative abundance of 10 protective genera (p < 0.05), and old buildings had mix effects to protective genera (p < 0.05).Our data shows that taxa from different phylogenetic classes and ecological niches have different health effects, indicating the importance of incorporating evolutionary and ecological concepts in revealing general patterns in the microbiome asthma association analysis.

Childhood lower respiratory tract infections linked to residential airborne bacterial and fungal microbiota

“…According to Fu et al (2020a), the bacterial phylum Actinobacteriota was found to be protectively associated with respiratory infections among students. A few other studies also reported that taxa richness and abundance of Actinobacteria were protectively associated with childhood asthma (Karvonen et al, 2019;O'Connor et al, 2018) and asthma symptoms among university students (Fu et al, 2020b). This contradicts our findings as we found Actinobacteria to be positively associated with increased risk of LRTI among under-five children.…”

Associations between respiratory infections and bacterial microbiome in student dormitories in Northern China

“…Two indoor microbiome studies reported that taxa from Actinobacteria were mainly protective for childhood asthma 36,51 . Our previous study showed that taxa richness and abundance in Actinobacteria were protectively associated with asthma symptoms 52 . Actinobacteria is a diverse class of bacteria, which widely distributed in various terrestrial and aquatic environments 53,54 .…”

Disturbance Triggers Non-Linear Microbe-Environment Feedbacks

“…Their framework draws attention to causal relationships between microbial characteristics, environmental dynamics, and cumulative ecosystems processes with the potential to incorporate relevant mechanistic links into predictive ecosystem models. A powerful element of the Hall et al ( 6 ) framework is that it applies to diverse systems spanning natural ( 7 ), host-associated ( 8 ), and built ( 9 ) environments as well as across spatiotemporal scales ( 10 ). While potentially very useful, the Hall et al ( 6 ) framework has seen little direct use in terms of explicitly defining and evaluating the linkages within specific study systems (but see 3 ).…”