Household arthropods as a seasonal reservoir of bacterial human pathogens

The indoor environment has recently been recognised as an ecosystem, and although the presence of arthropods may have public health implications, little information is available. This work examined the bacterial communities associated with household arthropods in the West Midlands region (United Kingdom). Arthropods in twenty English homes were captured during a 12-month citizen science project and their associated exogenous and endogenous bacterial communities examined using both culture-dependent and -independent techniques, the latter based on 16S rRNA gene metabarcoding. Several environmental opportunistic pathogens were detected although synanthropic arthropods harboured many human-associated bacteria, suggesting that bacterial communities are likely to be influenced by the surrounding environment.