AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
Diversity and Ice Nucleation Activity of Microorganisms collected with a Small Unmanned Aircraft System (sUAS) in France and the United States
Regina Hanlon, Craig Powers, Celia Jimenez-Sanchez, Cindy E. Morris, DAVID SCHMALE, Virginia Tech
Abstract Number: 291 Working Group: Bioaerosols
Abstract Many microbes relevant to crops, domestic animals, and humans are transported over long distances through the atmosphere. Some of these atmospheric microbes catalyze the freezing of water at higher temperatures and facilitate the onset of precipitation. We collected microbes from the lower atmosphere in France and the United States with a small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS). Fifty-five sampling missions were conducted at two locations in France in 2014 (an airfield in Pujaut, and the top of Puy de Dome), and three locations in the U.S. in 2015 (a farm in Blacksburg, Virginia, and a farm and a lake in Baton Rouge, Louisiana). The sUAS was a fixed-wing electric pusher platform equipped with a remote-operated sampling device that was opened once the aircraft reached the desired sampling altitude (40 to 50 meters above ground level). Samples were collected on agar media (TSA, CLA, R4A, R2A, and CA) with and without the fungicide cycloheximide. Over 4,000 colonies were recovered across the 55 sUAS sampling missions. A droplet freezing assay was used to screen nearly 2,000 colonies for ice nucleation activity, and 15 colonies were ice nucleation active at temperatures warmer than -8 degrees Celsius. Colonies are being identified based on DNA sequences of portions of the 16S rDNA gene. Future work aims to understand the potential origin of the atmospheric microbial assemblages collected with sUAS, and their association with mesoscale atmospheric processes.