Investigation of Surface Bacterial Diversities and Compositions in the Global Subway Facilities

Indoor microbes are a key component of air contamination that causes human health risks. However, compared with the aquatic and soil environment, microbial diversity and taxonomic structure and composition in subway facility are not well characterized. This study tries to explore surface bacterial communities by using swabs collected from four global subway facilities, such as Busan, Boston, Mexico City, and Moscow using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The alpha-diversities on bacterial communities were significantly different between Moscow and other samples, despite the different sample characteristics among Busan, Boston, Mexico City samples. For bacterial taxonomic composition, three phyla such as Actinobacteria (41.1%), Proteobacteria (27.7%), and Firmicutes (18.9%), were most dominant among all samples, indicating that there was no significance (p > 0.05). The subway station surface samples were mostly dominated by Gram-positive bacteria, including genera Corynebacterium, Staphylococcus, and Streptococcus. PCoA analysis also revealed that the Moscow bacterial communities were clearly separated from others. In addition, core genera were only shared 75 genera among all samples, but 486 genera were shared with three global stations, such as Busan, Boston and Mexico City. These results suggested that the human activity and geographical environment potentially affect the establishment of the bacterial community. Although this study provided basic information on surface bacterial communities in the subway system, there is a remaining unknown microbiome in the indoor air environment. Therefore, we consistently try to understand the indoor environment's microbial ecology in the subway system.

Automated summary

This study explores surface bacterial communities in subway facilities by sequencing swabs collected from four global subway stations using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. The results show that there are significant differences in alpha-diversity between Moscow and other samples. The dominant phyla in all samples are Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Firmicutes, with no significant differences. The study suggests that human activity and geographical environment may affect the establishment of bacterial communities.