Metatranscriptomic Analysis of Bacterial Communities on Laundered Textiles: A Pilot Case Study

Abstract

Microbially contaminated washing machines and mild laundering conditions facilitate the survival and growth of microorganisms on laundry, promoting undesired side effects such as malodor formation. Clearly, a deeper understanding of the functionality and hygienic relevance of the laundry microbiota necessitates the analysis of the microbial gene expression on textiles after washing, which—to the best of our knowledge—has not been performed before. In this pilot case study, we used single-end RNA sequencing to generate de novo transcriptomes of the bacterial communities remaining on polyester and cotton fabrics washed in a domestic washing machine in mild conditions and subsequently incubated under moist conditions for 72 h. Two common de novo transcriptome assemblers were used. The final assemblies included 22,321 Trinity isoforms and 12,600 Spades isoforms. A large part of these isoforms could be assigned to the SwissProt database, and was further categorized into “molecular function”, “biological process” and “cellular component” using Gene Ontology (GO) terms. In addition, differential gene expression was used to show the difference in the pairwise comparison of the two tissue types. When comparing the assemblies generated with the two assemblers, the annotation results were relatively similar. However, there were clear differences between the de novo assemblies regarding differential gene expression.

Microbial profile of T-shirts after a fitness session of Chinese students

“…Cotton, a natural fiber, originates from the plants of Gossypium cotton, and have a high adsorbing capacity as cotton fibers consist of cellulose. While polyester, a petroleum-based synthetic fiber, has no natural properties, and synthetic fibers have a very poor adsorbing capacity due to their molecular structure ( Jacksch et al., 2021 ; Levitt, 1947 ). It is widely believed that textile fabrics made from cotton, wool, and other similar protein and cellulose fibers are suitable substrates for bacterial growth, as bacteria grow more rapidly in a moist environment ( Massaroni et al., 2015 ).…”