Farm-related microbial exposure has been shown to have protective effects on childhood asthma. The connection of early-life microbial exposure to several other diseases, such as childhood asthma, has been studied extensively during the past decades. These patterns of the immune function can persist until adult age and are linked to the etiology of allergy. The immune system goes through rapid changes during early life, adapting and maturing in response to environmental exposures to microbes and allergens it encounters. In westernized societies, children spend approximately 90% of their time indoors, which emphasizes the health relevance of exposures through indoor air. Improved approaches for the assessment of infant microbial exposure, such as sampling at the infant breathing zone level, are needed.Įarly-life microbial exposures support the homeostatic immunological development and have been shown to contribute to the risk of asthma and other immunomodulatory diseases with rising prevalence. Thus, the microbial exposure of infants following dust resuspension is difficult to predict based on common house dust or bulk air measurements. Crawling induces resuspension of floor dust from carpeted flooring, creating a concentrated and localized cloud of microbial content around the infant. The microbiota in the infant breathing zone differ in absolute quantitative and compositional terms from that of the adult breathing zone and of floor dust. Bacterial diversity in carpet dust and the infant breathing zone did not correlate significantly. The relative abundance of bacterial taxa was characteristically distinct in carpet dust and infant and adult breathing zones during the infant crawling experiments. The correlation in rank orders of microbial levels in the carpet dust and the corresponding infant breathing zone sample varied between different microbial groups but was mostly moderate. During walking experiments, the increase in microbial levels in the infant breathing zone was far less pronounced. ![]() During crawling, fungal and bacterial levels were, on average, 8- to 21-fold higher in the infant breathing zone compared to measurements from the adult breathing zone. We applied bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequencing and quantitative PCR to monitor the infant breathing zone microbial content and compared that to the adult breathing zone and the carpet dust as the source. We conducted controlled chamber experiments with a simplified mechanical crawling infant robot and an adult volunteer walking over carpeted flooring. The aim of our study was to investigate how floor dust resuspension induced by an infant’s crawling motion and an adult walking affects infant inhalation exposure to microbes. Resuspension of floor dust and its impact on infant microbial exposure is, however, little explored. ![]() Floor dust is commonly used for microbial determinations in epidemiological studies to estimate early-life indoor microbial exposures.
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