Subway station study reveals fungal communities

Summary

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Subways don't just bring people together. They're also a hub of microbial activity, including fungi. Over the course of a year, an international team of researchers collected air samples from 15 stations in the Beijing subway network, one of the largest in the world, and cataloged the fungal species they found. In Microbiology Spectrum, they report their findings. Their analyses turned up a highly diverse community—spanning 270 genera—that varied not only by season but also by whether a station was an interchange connecting line, a suburban station or some other type. The bacterial microbiome of the subway environment has been well documented and analyzed in previous studies looking at subway systems, including those of Hong Kong, New York City and Boston, said Jun-min Liang, Ph.D., at the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study. Fungal communities in transit hubs, however, have received less attention until now. With the new study, Liang said, "we convert from a bacterial-centric perspective to a more comprehensive '2-kingdom' understanding of transit micro-ecology." This broader view of subway microbial communities, she said, could enhance public health initiatives—such as improved pathogen detection. This deeper understanding could also support efforts to improve air quality, because fungi, compared to bacteria, are more easily dispersed through air currents. The research group had previously studied fungal diversity, particularly plant pathogens, in agricultural settings where grains, soils and seeds interact with microorganisms. "Subways represent a unique extreme," noted Liang. "They constitute an almost enclosed, human-made biome built of steel and concrete." By comparing these distinct environments, researchers can test whether the ecological patterns observed in agricultural systems also hold true in subterranean transit ecosystems. From October 2021 to September 2022, the researchers coll...