New paper out: metagenomics study of poultry production environments

I am happy to say that myself and my collaborators in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health here at the University of Iowa have had our recent work on the bacterial composition of poultry bioaerosols (i.e., the dust that poultry workers breath during their tasks) published in Microbial Biotechnology.   

The key figure from this work is the following heat map that illustrates the top taxa that are common to all 21 samples:

mbt212380-fig-0003

What is remarkable about whole-genome shotgun metagenomics is that we are not only surveying bacterial DNA, but also viral, fungal, archaeal, and eukaryotic DNA in one experiment.  You can see from the figure that certain viruses are found in all samples, but it is bacteria, particularly Lactobacillus and Salinicoccus, that are the most abundant.

Stay tuned because we will have a paper coming out soon on the fungal composition of these samples as well.   In the case of this paper, and our next manuscript, it is the first time whole-genome shotgun metagenomics has been applied to the field of environmental health in poultry environments.