City-Scale Meta-Analysis of Indoor Airborne Microbiota Reveals that Taxonomic and Functional Compositions Vary with Building Types

Currently, there is a lack of understanding
on the variations of
the indoor airborne microbiotas of different building types within
a city, and how operational taxonomic unit (OTU)- and amplicon sequence
variant (ASV)-based analyses of the 16S rRNA gene sequences affect
interpretation of the indoor airborne microbiota results. Therefore,
in this study, the indoor airborne bacterial microbiotas between commercial
buildings, residences, and subways within the same city were compared
using both OTU- and ASV-based analytic methods. Our findings suggested
that indoor airborne bacterial microbiota compositions were significantly
different between building types regardless of the bioinformatics
method used. The processes of ecological drift and random dispersal
consistently played significant roles in the assembly of the indoor
microbiota across building types. Abundant taxa tended to be more
centralized in the correlation network of each building type, highlighting
their importance. Taxonomic changes between the microbiotas of different
building types were also linked to changes in their inferred metabolic
function capabilities. Overall, the results imply that customized
strategies are necessary to manage indoor airborne bacterial microbiotas
for each building type or even within each specific building.