Bioaerosols along transported pathway of Asian dust. aerosol metagenome

Previous studies have shown that bioaerosols injected into the atmosphere along with dust events, may affect leeward ecosystem, human health and agricultural productivity, even induce climate change. However, the bioaerosols dynamics were rarely investigated along transported pathway of Asian dust, especially in China, where dust events could affect huge areas and massive numbers of people. In view of this, we carried out Dust-Bioaerosol (DuBi) 2016 Campaign over Northern China. Combining microscopy and MiSeq sequencing analysis, the effects of dust events from the Asian Gobi Desert on the amounts and diversities of bioaerosols in downwind areas were investigated. On dust days, not only the amounts of bacteria increased dramatically, but the alpha diversity of bacteria also had a rapid growing, which illustrated that dust clouds carried many and various bacteria into the downwind areas, and may have potential important impact on ecological environment and climate. Among the bioaerosols carried by dust clouds, some microbes can be used for provenance tracking of dust events, especially used to distinguish long-distance transported dust and local dust. Due to existence of these tracking microbes, the dust and non-dust samples can be separated from each other clearly by principal co-ordinates analysis (PCoA) with weighted UniFrac distances.