1. Ecological succession of the microbial communities of an air-conditioning cooling coil in the tropics
- Author
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Enzo Acerbi, Dana Miller, V. W-C. Chang, Daniela I. Drautz-Moses, Caroline Chénard, Akira Uchida, Federico M. Lauro, Nicolas E. Gaultier, Cassie E. Heinle, Stephan C. Schuster, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Asian School of the Environment, and Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering
- Subjects
0301 basic medicine ,16S ,Environmental Engineering ,010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences ,Microorganism ,Airflow ,Air Microbiology ,Ecological succession ,01 natural sciences ,Sphingomonas ,Sink (geography) ,Agaricomycetes ,03 medical and health sciences ,RNA, Ribosomal, 16S ,HVAC ,Duct (flow) ,Air Conditioning ,Ecosystem ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,geography ,Tropical Climate ,geography.geographical_feature_category ,biology ,business.industry ,Ecology ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,Fungi ,Building and Construction ,biology.organism_classification ,030104 developmental biology ,Air conditioning ,Air Pollution, Indoor ,Airborne ,business ,Environmental Monitoring - Abstract
Air-conditioning systems harbor microorganisms, potentially spreading them to indoor environments. While air and surfaces in air-conditioning systems are periodically sampled as potential sources of indoor microbes, little is known about the dynamics of cooling coil-associated communities and their effect on the downstream airflow. Here, we conducted a 4-week time series sampling to characterize the succession of an air-conditioning duct and cooling coil after cleaning. Using an universal primer pair targeting hypervariable regions of the 16S/18S ribosomal RNA, we observed a community succession for the condensed water, with the most abundant airborne taxon Agaricomycetes fungi dominating the initial phase and Sphingomonas bacteria becoming the most prevalent taxa toward the end of the experiment. Duplicate air samples collected upstream and downstream of the coil suggest that the system does not act as ecological filter or source/sink for specific microbial taxa during the duration of the experiment. MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore) Accepted version
- Published
- 2015