Diversity and Source of Airborne Microbial Communities at Differential Polluted Sites of Rome

Biogenic fraction of airborne PM10 which includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and pollens, has been proposed as one of the potential causes of the PM10 toxicity. The present study aimed to pro-vide a comprehensive understanding of the microbial community variations associated to PM10, and their main local sources in the surrounding environment in three urban sites of Rome, characterized by differential pollution rate: green area, residential area and polluted area close to the traffic roads. We combined high-throughput amplicon sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene and the fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, with detailed chemical analysis of particulate matter sam-pled from air, paved road surfaces and leaf surfaces of Quercus ilex. Our results demonstrated that bacterial and fungal airborne communities were characterized by the highest alpha-diversity and grouped separately from epiphytic and road dust communities. The reconstruction of source-sink relationships revealed that the resuspension/deposition of road dust from traffic might contribute to the maximum magnitude of microbial exchanges. The relative abundance of extremotolerant microbes was found to be enhanced in epiphytic communities and was associated to a progressively increase of pollution levels as well as opportunistic human pathogenicity in fungal communities. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Authors
Pollegioni P.1 , Mattioni C.1 , Ristorini M.1, 2 , Occhiuto D.3 , Canepari S.4 , Korneykova M.V. 5, 6 , Gavrichkova O. 1, 5
Journal
Publisher
MDPI AG
Number of issue
2
Language
English
Status
Published
Number
224
Volume
13
Year
2022
Organizations
  • 1 Research Institute on Terrestrial Ecosystems, National Research Council, Porano, 05010, Italy
  • 2 Department of Bioscience and Territory, University of Molise, Pesche, 86090, Italy
  • 3 Agenzia Regionale Protezione Ambiente del Lazio, Rome, 00187, Italy
  • 4 Department of Chemistry, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, 00185, Italy
  • 5 Agro-Technology Institute, Peoples Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, 117198, Russian Federation
  • 6 Institute of the North Industrial Ecology Problems, Kola Science Centre of Russian Academy of Sciences, Apatity, 184209, Russian Federation
Keywords
Chemical tracers; Metabarcoding; Microbiomes; Particulate matter; Pathogenic microorganisms; Pollution; Urban area
Date of creation
06.07.2022
Date of change
06.07.2022
Short link
https://repository.rudn.ru/en/records/article/record/83885/
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