Beyond water and soil: Air emerges as a major reservoir of human pathogens

Assessing the risk of human pathogens in the environment is crucial for controlling the spread of diseases and safeguarding human health. However, conducting a thorough assessment of low-abundance pathogens in highly complex environmental microbial communities remains challenging. This study compile...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environment international 2024-08, Vol.190, p.108869, Article 108869
Main Authors: Li, Tong, Feng, Kai, Wang, Shang, Yang, Xingsheng, Peng, Xi, Tu, Qichao, Deng, Ye
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air Microbiology
Bacteria - classification
Bacteria - genetics
Bacteria - isolation & purification
Disease Reservoirs - microbiology
Diversity
Environmental Monitoring
Environmental risk
Global scale
Human pathogens
Humans
Metagenome
Metagenomics
Microbiome
One health
Risk Assessment
Soil Microbiology
Water Microbiology
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Summary:Assessing the risk of human pathogens in the environment is crucial for controlling the spread of diseases and safeguarding human health. However, conducting a thorough assessment of low-abundance pathogens in highly complex environmental microbial communities remains challenging. This study compiled a comprehensive catalog of 247 human-pathogenic bacterial taxa from global biosafety agencies and identified more than 78 million genome-specific markers (GSMs) from their 17,470 sequenced genomes. Subsequently, we analyzed these pathogens’ types, abundance, and diversity within 474 shotgun metagenomic sequences obtained from diverse environmental sources. The results revealed that among the four habitats studied (air, water, soil, and sediment), the detection rate, diversity, and abundance of detectable pathogens in the air all exceeded those in the other three habitats. Air, sediment, and water environments exhibited identical dominant taxa, indicating that these human pathogens may have unique environmental vectors for their transmission or survival. Furthermore, we observed the impact of human activities on the environmental risk posed by these pathogens, where greater amounts of human activities significantly increased the abundance of human pathogenic bacteria, especially in water and air. These findings have remarkable implications for the environmental risk assessment of human pathogens, providing valuable insights into their presence and distribution across different habitats.
ISSN:0160-4120
1873-6750
1873-6750
DOI:10.1016/j.envint.2024.108869