Environmental shaping of the bacterial and fungal community in infant bed dust and correlations with the airway microbiota

From birth the airway microbiota of infants is shaped by exposures in early life, possibly influencing later risk of airway associated diseases. As infants spend a considerable amount of time indoors, we hypothesize that the indoor dust microbiota might have an important role in the airway microbial development. To explore how the bed dust microbiota interacts with children's hypopharyngeal microbiota, we sampled 577 beds from the Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood2010 (COPSAC2010) cohort. The bed dust microbiota was profiled with both bacterial and fungal amplicon sequencing while hypopharyngeal samples were profiled with bacterial amplicon sequencing only.