Biology subjects

Gering, S.

Publications and source records attributed to Gering, S..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Spatiotemporal dynamics in airborne fungi and fungal allergens across the United States

A broad diversity of fungi can be found in the near-surface atmosphere, with both the amounts and types of airborne fungi varying across space and time. However, the specific spatiotemporal patterns in airborne fungal assemblages often remain unquantified. This knowledge gap is particularly notable for allergenic fungi, despite the relevance of airborne fungal allergen exposures to public health. To better understand how airborne fungi, including known allergens, vary across broad spatial and temporal scales, we leveraged a pre-existing air sampling network to obtain bioaerosol samples from 7 national parks representing diverse biome types across the United States, with samples collected from each site every three days over an entire calendar year. We used marker gene DNA sequencing and quantitative PCR to characterize fungal assemblage composition and concentrations, including the concentrations of ten known allergenic genera. As expected, the composition of the airborne fungal assemblages, including the amounts and types of known allergens, varied across biomes. We also observed substantial temporal variation in the total amounts and types of fungi detected, particularly at higher latitude sites. While some of the temporal variation in allergen abundances followed seasonal patterns, we detected pronounced daily and weekly fluctuations in taxon-specific allergen abundances, with higher wind speeds generally associated with higher fungal allergen concentrations. Together, these results expand our understanding of fungal aerobiology across natural ecosystems and demonstrate how combining extensive air-sampling efforts with DNA-based analyses can improve assessments of public health risks associated with exposure to allergenic fungi in outdoor air. IMPORTANCEDespite major advances in sampling methodologies, sequencing technologies, and access to air quality monitoring networks, comprehensive assessments of the spatial and temporal variation in airborne fungi remain limited, even though fungi constitute a substantial proportion of the aerobiome. This is true even for allergenic fungal taxa, despite their importance to human health. Using DNA-based approaches, we characterized fungal assemblages in the near-surface atmosphere over a single calendar year at 7 national parks across the US. We found that each site had distinct airborne fungal assemblages with unique temporal patterns in fungal abundances and composition. Substantial spatiotemporal variation was also observed for known fungal allergens, driven by both seasonal trends and environmental factors. This study advances our understanding of the ecological patterns that structure airborne fungal communities and the factors influencing outdoor exposures to allergenic fungi, improving our ability to assess and predict health risks associated with fungal allergens.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2022

A metagenomic investigation of spatial and temporal changes in sewage microbiomes across a university campus

Wastewater microbial communities are not static and can vary significantly across time and space, but this variation and the factors driving the observed spatiotemporal variation often remain undetermined. We used a shotgun metagenomic approach to investigate changes in wastewater microbial communities across 17 locations in a sewer network, with samples collected from each location over a 3-week period. Fecal-derived bacteria constituted a relatively small fraction of the taxa found in the collected samples, highlighting the importance of environmental sources to the sewage microbiome. The prokaryotic communities were highly variable in composition depending on the location within the sampling network and this spatial variation was most strongly associated with location-specific differences in sewage pH. However, we also observed substantial temporal variation in the composition of the prokaryotic communities at individual locations. This temporal variation was asynchronous across sampling locations, emphasizing the importance of independently considering both spatial and temporal variation when assessing the wastewater microbiome. The spatiotemporal patterns in viral community composition closely tracked those of the prokaryotic communities, allowing us to putatively identify the bacterial hosts of some of the dominant viruses in these systems. Finally, we found that antibiotic resistance gene profiles also exhibit a high degree of spatiotemporal variability with most of these genes unlikely to be derived from fecal bacteria. Together these results emphasize the dynamic nature of the wastewater microbiome, the challenges associated with studying these systems, and the utility of metagenomic approaches for building a multi-faceted understanding of these microbial communities and their functional attributes. ImportanceSewage systems harbor extensive microbial diversity, including microbes derived from both human and environmental sources. Studies of the sewage microbiome are useful for monitoring public health and the health of our infrastructure, but the sewage microbiome can be highly variable in ways that are often unresolved. We sequenced DNA recovered from wastewater samples collected over a 3-week period at 17 locations in a single sewer system to determine how these communities vary across time and space. Most of the wastewater bacteria, and the antibiotic resistance genes they harbor, were not derived from human feces, but human usage patterns did impact how the amounts and types of bacteria and bacterial genes we found in these systems varied over time. Likewise, the wastewater communities, including both bacteria and their viruses, varied depending on location within the sewage network, highlighting the challenges, and opportunities, in efforts to monitor and understand the sewage microbiome.

microbiology↗