AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Environmental Microbes and Ambient Moisture: How Microbes Contribute to the Chemistry of Our Homes
RACHEL I. ADAMS, Sarah Haines, Katarzyna Marciniak, Karen C. Dannemiller, Allen Goldstein, Pawel Misztal, University of California, Berkeley
Abstract Number: 81 Working Group: The Air We Breathe: Indoor Aerosol Sources and Chemistry
Abstract There are many potential sources of volatile chemicals in homes, and how environmental microbes contribute to this chemical milieu is not well understood. The average American house collects two pounds of dust per year; this house dust represents a large chemical and biological reservoir. We are a new research collaboration aiming to (A) develop a framework for the household conditions under which microbes are active and contribute to volatile chemistry and to (B) determine the relative importance of the composition of microbes and substrate on chemical emissions. We are using experimental systems in the laboratory to investigate the relationship between air relative humidity, household surface type, microbial inoculation, and volatile emissions. Specifically, our experiments address the following questions: (1) What are the moisture requirements for microbial growth and mVOC emissions, following the time-of- wetness model? (2) Is there an inflection point in microbial growth across increasing air relative humidity? (3) How do abiotic (substrate type and source) and biotic factors (microbial inoculation) interact to shape mVOC production? (4) Do microbes contribute to the degradation of wood into furfural and furanoid compounds under typical household conditions? (5) Can we link the gene expression of fungal communities through metatranscriptomic analysis to specific mVOCs emitted? We plan to present preliminary results from experiments conducted in the summer of 2019. This work will expand our understanding of microbially-made chemicals in indoor environments.