Impact of climate zones and seasons on indoor airborne microbial communities: Insights from a comprehensive analysis

Bacteria and fungi are ubiquitous throughout built environments and are suspended in the air, potentially affecting human health. However, the impacts of climate zones on the diversity, structure, and stochastic assembly of indoor airborne microbes remain unknown. This study comprehensively analyzed indoor airborne microbes across five climate zones in China during the summer and winter using high-throughput sequencing. The diversity and structure of indoor airborne communities vary across climatic zones. A random forest model was used to identify biomarkers in different climate zones. The results showed no relationship between the biomarkers and their rankings in mean relative abundance. The Sloan neutral model fitting results indicated that the impact of climate zones on the stochastic process in the assembly of indoor…