Bioaerosols in swine confinement buildings: A metaproteomic view

Swine confinement buildings (SCBs) represent workplaces with high biological air pollution. It is suspected that individual components of inhalable air are causatives of chronic respiratory disease that are regularly detected among workers. In order to understand the relationship between exposure and stress, the aim of this study was to develop a method to investigate the components of bioaerosols in more detail. For this purpose, bioaerosols from pig barns were collected on quartz filters from two exclusively housed pig types (porkers and gestating sows) and subsequently analyzed via a combinatorial approach of 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing and metaproteomics. The workflow helps to clarify diversity in bioaerosols from a taxonomic perspective, but also from a functional perspective.