Correlation between bioaerosol microbial community characteristics and real-time measurable environmental items: A case study from KORUS-AQ pre-campaign in Seoul, Korea

Abstract:

Due to global climate change, bioaerosols are more globally mixed with a more random manner. During a long-distance traveling dust event, the number of microbes significantly increases in bioaerosol, and the chance for bioaerosol to contain human pathogenic microorganisms may also increase. Recently, we have found that bioaerosol microbial community characteristics (copy number of total bacterial 16S rRNA genes, and population diversity and composition) are correlated with the quantitative detection of potential human pathogens. However, bioaerosol microbial community characteristics cannot be directly used in real-time monitoring because the DNA-based detection method requires at least couple days or a week to get reliable data. To circumvent this problem, a correlation of microbial community characteristics with real-time measurable environmental items (PM₁₀, PM_2.5, temperature, humidity, NO_x, O₃ etc.), if any, will be useful in frequent assessment of microbial risk from available real-time measured environmental data. In this work, we monitored bioaerosol microbial communities using a high-throughput DNA sequencing method (Mi-seq) during the KORUS-AQ (KoreaUS-Air Quality) pre-campaign (May to June, 2015) in Seoul, and investigated whether any correlation exists between the bioaerosol microbial community characteristics and the real-time measureable environmental items simultaneously attained during the pre-campaign period. At the pre-campaign site (Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul), bioaerosol samples were collected using high volume air sampler, and their 16S rRNA gene based bacterial communities were analyzed by Miseq sequencing and bioinformatics. Simultaneously, atmosphere environmental items were monitored at the same site. Using Decision Tree, a non-linear multi-variant correlation was observed between the bioaerosol microbial community characteristics and the real-time measured atmosphere chemistry data, and a rule induction was developed to assess bacterial community characteristics from the real-time measurable chemistry data. The findings suggest that it is promising to develop a new method in real-time assessing bioaerosol microbial risk from diverse real-time measured data including satellite and flight monitoring.