Abstract
The microorganisms at the workplace contribute towards a large portion of the biodiversity a person encounters in his or her life. Health care professionals are often at risk due to their frontline nature of work. Competition and cooperation between nasal bacterial communities of individuals working in a health care setting have been shown to mediate pathogenic microbes. Therefore, we investigated the nasal bacterial community of 47 healthy individuals working in a clinical research laboratory in Kuwait. The taxonomic profiling and core microbiome analysis identified three pre-dominant genera as Corynebacterium (15.0%), Staphylococcus (10.3%) and, Moraxella (10.0%). All the bacterial genera exhibited seasonal variations in summer, winter, autumn and spring. SparCC correlation network analysis revealed positive and negative correlations among the classified genera. A rich set of 16 genera (q < 0.05) were significantly differentially abundant (LEfSe) across the four seasons. The highest species counts, richness and evenness (P < 0.005) were recorded in autumn. Community structure profiling indicated that the entire bacterial population followed a seasonal distribution (R2-0.371; P < 0.001). Other demographic factors such as age, gender and, ethnicity contributed minimally towards community clustering in a closed indoor laboratory setting. Intra-personal diversity also witnessed rich species variety (maximum 6.8 folds). Seasonal changes in the indoor working place in conjunction with the outdoor atmosphere seems to be important for the variations in the nasal bacterial communities of professionals working in a health care setting.
Highlights
The human body houses 10 to 100 trillion diverse bacteria, which are almost equal to the cells in our body [1]
We aimed to understand the composition of bacterial communities of the health care workers stationed in the research core facility of Kuwait
Data rarefication (S3 Fig in S1 Appendix) yielded 2363 OTUs (HC) that were used for comparison with a dataset of two groups [15, 29] i.e. nasal microbial communities of healthcare workers (HCC) of a health institute and non-healthcare workers (NHC) from a farm
Summary
The human body houses 10 to 100 trillion diverse bacteria, which are almost equal to the cells in our body [1]. Each site in a human body act as a distinct ecosystem, be it the gut, mouth, scalp, skin, and, any other crevices or orifices. The nose is an important site of microbial colonization [4,5,6,7]. The outermost segment of the nose, the nostrils or, anterior nares, is a transition zone from the outer environment to the windpipe and the respiratory organs [8]. It is known that opportunistic pathogens in the anterior nasal cavity spread to other sections of the respiratory tract and are involved in the development of respiratory disorders such as allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, asthma, pneumonia, otitis media, etc. It is known that opportunistic pathogens in the anterior nasal cavity spread to other sections of the respiratory tract and are involved in the development of respiratory disorders such as allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, asthma, pneumonia, otitis media, etc. [9]
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