New papers on microbiology of the built environment , April 25 , 2016

(...) we wanted to identify key environmental determinants for the house dust microbiome from an existing collection of spatially (area of Munich, Germany) and temporally (301 days) distributed samples and to determine changes in the community as a function of time. To that end, dust samples that had been collected once from the living room floors of 286 individual households, were profiled for fungal and bacterial community variation and diversity using microbial fingerprinting techniques. (...) We inferred that fungal communities in indoor dust changed semiannually, whereas bacterial communities paralleled outdoor plant phenological periods. These differences in temporal dynamics cannot be fully explained and should be further investigated in future studies on indoor microbiomes.