Madden Anne A, Barberán Albert, Bertone Matthew A, Menninger Holly L, Dunn Robert R, Fierer Noah
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA.
Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA.
Mol Ecol. 2016 Dec;25(24):6214-6224. doi: 10.1111/mec.13900. Epub 2016 Nov 28.
We spend most of our lives inside homes, surrounded by arthropods that impact our property as pests and our health as disease vectors and producers of sensitizing allergens. Despite their relevance to human health and well-being, we know relatively little about the arthropods that exist in our homes and the factors structuring their diversity. As previous work has been limited in scale by the costs and time associated with collecting arthropods and the subsequent morphological identification, we used a DNA-based method for investigating the arthropod diversity in homes via high-throughput marker gene sequencing of home dust. Settled dust samples were collected by citizen scientists from both inside and outside more than 700 homes across the United States, yielding the first continental-scale estimates of arthropod diversity associated with our residences. We were able to document food webs and previously unknown geographic distributions of diverse arthropods - from allergen producers to invasive species and nuisance pests. Home characteristics, including the presence of basements, home occupants and surrounding land use, were more useful than climate parameters in predicting arthropod diversity in homes. These noninvasive, scalable tools and resultant findings not only provide the first continental-scale maps of household arthropod diversity, but our analyses also provide valuable baseline information on arthropod allergen exposures and the distributions of invasive pests inside homes.
我们一生中的大部分时间都待在家里，周围都是节肢动物，它们作为害虫影响着我们的财产，作为疾病传播媒介和致敏过敏原的产生者影响着我们的健康。尽管它们与人类健康和福祉密切相关，但我们对家中存在的节肢动物以及构成其多样性的因素知之甚少。由于先前的工作在规模上受到与收集节肢动物及后续形态鉴定相关的成本和时间的限制，我们采用了一种基于DNA的方法，通过对家庭灰尘进行高通量标记基因测序来研究家中的节肢动物多样性。美国各地700多户家庭的公民科学家收集了室内外的沉降灰尘样本，得出了与我们住所相关的节肢动物多样性的首个大陆规模估计值。我们能够记录食物网以及各种节肢动物此前未知的地理分布——从过敏原产生者到入侵物种和令人讨厌的害虫。在预测家中节肢动物多样性方面，包括是否有地下室、住户情况和周边土地利用在内的房屋特征比气候参数更有用。这些非侵入性、可扩展的工具及所得结果不仅提供了首张大陆规模的家庭节肢动物多样性地图，而且我们的分析还提供了有关节肢动物过敏原暴露以及家中入侵害虫分布的宝贵基线信息。
