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The Boston Subway Microbiome - mSystems/American Society for Microbiology

1,485 views · Published 7 July 2016 · 1:37 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: ASM - Microbes Make Our World · 2016 · Science & Technology

Mass transit environments, specifically, urban subways, are distinct microbial environments with high occupant densities, diversities, and turnovers, and they are thus especially relevant to public health. Despite this, only three culture-independent subway studies have been performed, all since 2013 and all with widely differing designs and conclusions. In this study, we profiled the Boston subway system, which provides 238 million trips per year overseen by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). This yielded the first high-precision microbial survey of a variety of surfaces, ridership environments, and microbiological functions (including tests for potential pathogenicity) in a mass transit environment. Characterizing microbial profiles for multiple transit systems will become increasingly important for biosurveillance of antibiotic resistance genes or pathogens, which can be early indicators for outbreak or sanitation events. Understanding how human contact, materials, and the environment affect microbial profiles may eventually allow us to rationally design public spaces to sustain our health in the presence of microbial reservoirs.

Urban Transit System Microbial Communities Differ by Surface Type and Interaction with Humans and the Environment

Tiffany Hsu
Regina Joice
Jose Vallarino
Galeb Abu-Ali
Erica M. Hartmann
Afrah Shafquat
Casey DuLong
Catherine Baranowski
Dirk Gevers
Jessica L. Green
Xochitl C. Morgan (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6264-6961)
John D. Spengler
Curtis Huttenhower (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1110-0096)

Rob Knight, Editor

Published in mSystems on 28 June 2016
Direct link: https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00018-16

mSystems™ publishes preeminent work that stems from applying technologies for high-throughput analyses to achieve insights into the metabolic and regulatory systems at the scale of both the single cell and microbial communities. The scope of mSystems™ encompasses all important biological and biochemical findings drawn from analyses of large data sets, as well as new computational approaches for deriving these insights. mSystems™ welcomes submissions from researchers who focus on the microbiome, genomics, metagenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, glycomics, bioinformatics, and computational microbiology. mSystems™ provides streamlined decisions, while carrying on ASM's tradition of rigorous peer review.
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