Geography and Location Are the Primary Drivers of Office Microbiome Composition

Abstract

Our study highlights several points that should impact the design of future studies of the microbiology of BEs. First, projects tracking changes in BE bacterial communities should focus sampling efforts on surveying different locations in offices and in different cities but not necessarily different materials or different offices in the same city. Next, disturbance due to repeated sampling, though detectable, is small compared to that due to other variables, opening up a range of longitudinal study designs in the BE. Next, studies requiring more samples than can be sequenced on a single sequencing run (which is increasingly common) must control for run effects by including some of the same samples in all of the sequencing runs as technical replicates. Finally, detailed tracking of indoor and material environment covariates is likely not essential for BE microbiome studies, as the normal range of indoor environmental conditions is likely not large enough to impact bacterial communities.

Microbial Community Patterns Associated with Automated Teller Machine Keypads in New York City

“…Data filtering and rarefaction did not effectively reduce or eliminate this technical artifact, and the Illumina run was found to be a strongly statistically significant sample grouping in PERMANOVA tests of Unifrac distances ( P = 0.0001; Table 1). The persistence of such a technical artifact has been similarly reported in other recent studies (14). However, in our case, the 18S rRNA amplicons from eukaryotic communities were sequenced on a single Illumina run and thus provided an independent assessment of PCoA patterns.…”

“…This is in contrast to swab samples collected directly from human body sites (see, e.g., the published datasets [44, 45] used as human sources in this study), which represent the personalized microbiome associated with a single person. Since each ATM keypad in New York City is most likely utilized by hundreds of people each day (and may come into contact with air, water, and microbes from different urban surfaces), the microbial communities obtained in this study may represent an “average” community that is effectively pooled from vastly different sources (14). An alternative and potentially more plausible hypothesis is that the SourceTracker algorithm may be highly sensitive to the primer region and sequencing platform used to generate the “source” training sequences.…”

“…Studies of the built environment have sought to understand how building architecture and engineering, in conjunction with human behavior, may influence the microbes that we encounter during our time spent indoors (which represents 87% of our time on average [8]). Such studies have aimed at capturing the microbial communities associated with both air and surfaces in homes (9, 10), hospitals (11, 12), classrooms (13), offices (14, 15), and restrooms (16), as well as community assemblages within plumbing systems (17–19) and an expanding set of other indoor microhabitats.…”

High temporal variability in airborne bacterial diversity and abundance inside single‐family residences

“…Although there have been relatively few culture-independent characterizations of microbial communities in the air in single-family residences, recent studies have characterized microbial communities in a variety of indoor environments, including university and elementary school classrooms, office buildings, healthcare settings, apartment buildings, daycare centers, the retail environment, and public restrooms. [18][19][20][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] These studies have indicated that the diversity and composition of indoor microbial communities can be strongly influenced by numerous factors, including architectural design, ventilation rates, occupants (e.g., humans and pets), and outdoor air community composition. 15,16,19,20,23,27,31,33,[35][36][37] Changes in the human microbiome signal on home surfaces have been observed over the timescale of days, 21 and temporal variation in indoor air communities has been observed over timescales of approximately 1 week.…”

The Airplane Cabin Microbiome

“…The microbiome of the built environment is an active research area. Using a wide range of methods, authors have studied the microbiomes of classrooms [27][28][29], homes [30][31][32], offices [33,34], hospitals [35], museums [36], nursing homes [37], stores [38], and subways [39][40][41]. Several of these studies, particularly those of classrooms and offices, identified significant quantities of Lactobacillus on seats.…”