Department of Biology and Keck Center for Behavioral Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2013 May 22;8(5):e64133. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0064133. Print 2013.
Most of our time is spent indoors where we are exposed to a wide array of different microorganisms living on surfaces and in the air of our homes. Despite their ubiquity and abundance, we have a limited understanding of the microbial diversity found within homes and how the composition and diversity of microbial communities change across different locations within the home. Here we examined the diversity of bacterial communities found in nine distinct locations within each of forty homes in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, USA, using high-throughput sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. We found that each of the sampled locations harbored bacterial communities that were distinct from one another with surfaces that are regularly cleaned typically harboring lower levels of diversity than surfaces that are cleaned infrequently. These location-specific differences in bacterial communities could be directly related to usage patterns and differences in the likely sources of bacteria dispersed onto these locations. Finally, we examined whether the variability across homes in bacterial diversity could be attributed to outdoor environmental factors, indoor habitat structure, or the occupants of the home. We found that the presence of dogs had a significant effect on bacterial community composition in multiple locations within homes as the homes occupied by dogs harbored more diverse communities and higher relative abundances of dog-associated bacterial taxa. Furthermore, we found a significant correlation between the types of bacteria deposited on surfaces outside the home and those found inside the home, highlighting that microbes from outside the home can have a direct effect on the microbial communities living on surfaces within our homes. Together this work provides the first comprehensive analysis of the microbial communities found in the home and the factors that shape the structure of these communities both within and between homes.
我们大部分时间都在室内度过，而室内环境中存在着大量生活在表面和空气中的不同微生物。尽管这些微生物无处不在且数量丰富，但我们对室内微生物多样性的了解有限，也不清楚室内微生物群落的组成和多样性在不同位置会如何变化。在这里，我们通过高通量测序细菌 16S rRNA 基因，检测了美国北卡罗来纳州罗利-达勒姆地区 40 户家庭中 9 个不同位置的细菌群落多样性。结果发现，每个采样点都拥有独特的细菌群落，而经常清洁的表面通常比不常清洁的表面具有更低的多样性。这些特定于位置的细菌群落差异可能与使用模式以及可能散布到这些位置的细菌来源的差异直接相关。最后，我们还研究了家庭间细菌多样性的可变性是否可以归因于室外环境因素、室内栖息地结构或家庭居住者。结果发现，狗的存在对家庭中多个位置的细菌群落组成有显著影响，因为养狗的家庭中存在更多样化的群落，并且狗相关细菌分类群的相对丰度更高。此外，我们还发现家庭内外表面上沉积的细菌类型之间存在显著相关性，这表明家庭外的微生物可以直接影响家庭内表面上的微生物群落。综上所述，本研究首次全面分析了家庭中存在的微生物群落以及影响这些群落结构在家庭内和家庭间形成的因素。
