| الوصف: |
Northeast India is considered as one of the major biodiversity hotspots in the world but the region is underexplored for their microbial biodiversity. Extensive characterization of biological aerosol (bioaerosol) samples collected from various locations of Northeast India was carried out for all the four seasons in a year. These were characterized in terms of particulate matters (inhalable, thoracic, and alveolic), their constituents (pollens, fungal spores, animal debris, and non-biological components), and finally the bacterial diversity was determined by DNA based metagenomic approach. The non-biological (non-viable) component of aerosols is found to vary from 30- 89% in pre-monsoon season which coexists with pollens (4-20%), animal debris (1-24%) and fungal spores (1-17%). The highest number of culturable microbial population in terms of CFU count was observed in the samples collected in pre-monsoon season (i.e., 125.24-632.45 CFU/m3) and the lowest CFU was observed in monsoon season (i.e., 20.83- 319.0 CFU/m3). The metagenomic approach with the samples collected during pre-monsoon season showed a total of bacterial 184 OTUs (operational taxonomic units) with 28,028 abundance count comprising with 7 major phylum, 6 classes, 10 orders, 15 families, 13 genus, and 8 species of bacteria. The species level distribution clearly shows the presence of Gammaproteobacteria (52%) most abundantly followed by Bacilli (21%), Alphaproteobacteria (14%), Betaproteobacteria (5%, Flavobacteria (5%), and Sphingobacteria (3%). It is the first report from entire Northeast India to uncover bacterial diversity in aerosol samples through DNA based metagenomic approach. |
