Fungal spores prevalent in the aerosol of the city of Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, over a 2-year period (2001–2002)

Abstract

This study was carried out over a 2-year period (2001 and 2002) with the aim of identifying the fungal population in the aerosol of the Southern city of Caxias do Sul, RS, Brazil. Sampling was performed using Hirst's non-viable volumetric method. Our results show the presence of a large number of fungal spore types, a total of 41. Three groups were predominant: Deuteromycotina, Ascomycotina and Basidiomycotina. In 2001, Deuteromycotina taxa represented 44.61% of the total annual spore counts, with the largest concentration occurring in the fall (58,637 spores); in 2002, it represented 40.03% of the total annual spore counts, and the largest concentration was obtained in the summer (68,317 spores). Ascomycotina was present at the same level (24.5%) in both years of sampling, and the highest concentrations were found out in the summer (2001: 42,183 spores; 2002: 29,461 spores). Basidiomycotina represented 22.37% of the total annual spore counts in 2001, and 20.41% in 2002, with the largest concentrations found in the summer (2001: 35,988 spores; 2002: 30,212 spores). The most frequent fungi found during the study period were Cladosporium, Coprinus, Leptosphaeria, Aspergillus/ Penicillium and Ganoderma. Permanent aerobiological monitoring would be necessary to detect associated environmental variations.

Validation of the Hirst-Type Spore Trap for Simultaneous Monitoring of Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Biodiversities in Urban Air Samples by Next-Generation Sequencing

“…Sequences assigned to the class Dothideomycetes were highly represented in all the samples ( Fig. 2A) and consisted mostly of sequences from Davidiella/Cladosporium (range, 33.48% to 50.35%; data not shown), in agreement with other works that analyzed airborne fungal communities in urban spaces by NGS and microscopy identification (39)(40)(41)(42)(43). CCC values of Ն0.98 confirmed a good concordance between the replicates (Fig.…”

First fungal spore calendar of the middle-west of the Iberian Peninsula

“…Ganoderma showed a seasonal summer-autumn pattern coinciding with the one observed in others researches carried out in the northern hemisphere (Oliveira et al 2005) and the southern hemisphere (De Antoni Zoppas et al 2006) countries. Low count of these spores in the Valladolid airspora could be due to the adequate substrate scarcity of fungus in the spore trap surroundings and the low wind velocity, which limited the spore contribution from far away, although winds from the second and the fourth quadrant showed to have a positive influence.…”

“…Cladosporium was the largest group captured in the aerobiological samples as occurred in some other Spanish cities (Díez et al 2006;Recio et al 2012), in some European and Mediterranean (Oliveira et al 2005;Erkara et al 2008;Pyrri and Kapnasaki-Gotsi 2015), but also in South America (De Antoni Zoppas et al 2006;Mallo et al 2011), in the USA (Levetin and Dorsey 2006), or even in South Africa (Dames and Cadman 1994), in Asia (Abu-Dieyeh et al 2010) and in Australia (Rutherford et al 1997), so that overall spores pattern was conditioning by Cladosporium results.…”

“…On the other hand, although fungi are ubiquitous and cosmopolite organisms (as they can be found in any site with warm temperature, humidity, oxygen and nutrients), seasonal behaviour of these particles is conditioned by differences in vegetation (De Antoni Zoppas et al 2006), and also in meteorological parameters which may influence their concentrations and/or their appearance in aerosol significantly Maya-Manzano et al 2012;Recio et al 2012;O'Connor et al 2014). For that reason, we decided to include the study of the correlations between daily spore concentrations and main meteorological parameters in order to determine which climate conditions may influence each spore type and in what sense.…”

Fluorescent biological aerosol particles measured with the Waveband Integrated Bioaerosol Sensor WIBS-4: laboratory tests combined with a one year field study

“…The abundance of fungal spores shows differences due to the environmental factors such as measurement location, season, measurement time and weather conditions (Elbert et al, 2007). The release of wet, actively-discharged BMC and AMC appears to be correlated to the relative humidity instead of precipitation (Hirst, 1953;Gregory and Hirst, 1957;De Antoni Zoppas et al, 2006). Among these, diversity of BMC is found to be greater than that of AMC in Germany (Fröhlich-Nowoisky et al, 2012).…”