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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Microbiomes
Sec. Environmental Microbiomes
Volume 3 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/frmbi.2024.1396560
This article is part of the Research Topic Interactions Between Natural and Built Environment Microbiomes in a One Health Context View all 3 articles
Phage communities in household-related biofilms correlate with bacterial hosts
Provisionally accepted- 1 Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States
- 2 University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States
The average American spends 93% of their time in built environments, almost 70% of that is in their place of residence. Human health and well-being are intrinsically tied to the quality of our personal environments and the microbiomes that populate them. Conversely, the built environment microbiome is seeded, formed, and re-shaped by occupant behavior, cleaning, personal hygiene and food choices, as well as geographic location and variability in infrastructure. Here, we focus on the presence of viruses in household biofilms, specifically in showerheads and on toothbrushes. Bacteriophage, viruses that infect bacteria with high host specificity, have been shown to drive microbial community structure and function through host infection and horizontal gene transfer in environmental systems. Due to the dynamic environment, with extreme temperature changes, periods of wetting/drying and exposure to hygiene/cleaning products, in addition to low biomass and transient nature of indoor microbiomes, we hypothesize that phage host infection in these unique built environments are different from environmental biofilm interactions. We approach the hypothesis using metagenomics, querying 34 toothbrush and 92 showerhead metagenomes. Representative of biofilms in the built environment, these interfaces demonstrate distinct levels of occupant interaction. We identified 22 complete, 232 high quality, and 362 medium quality viral OTUs. Viral community richness correlated with bacterial richness but not Shannon or Simpson indices. Of quality viral OTUs with sufficient coverage (614), 532 were connected with 32 bacterial families, of which only Sphingomonadaceae, Burkholderiaceae, and Caulobacteraceae are found in both toothbrushes and showerheads. Low average nucleotide identity to reference sequences and a high proportion of open reading frames annotated as hypothetical or unknown indicate that these environments harbor many novel and uncharacterized phage. The results of this study reveal the paucity of information available on bacteriophage in indoor environments and indicate a need for more virus-focused methods for DNA extraction and specific sequencing aimed at understanding viral impact on the microbiome in the built environment.
Keywords: virome, built enviroment, Biofilm, host-phage interaction, Mycobaceria
Received: 05 Mar 2024; Accepted: 30 Aug 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Huttelmaier, Shuai, Sumner, Gebert, Fierer and Hartmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Erica M. Hartmann, Northwestern University, Evanston, 60208, Illinois, United States
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