Dust monthly deposition and bacterial composition in arid regions.
Dust storms in the Middle East pose challenges to public health not only through exacerbation of air quality issues but by the hidden world of microorganisms that traverse large distances within these dust plumes. Bacterial diversity was investigated in dust samples collected from Qatar over two years. DNA was isolated followed by next-generation amplicon sequencing of hypervariable regions of the 16 S ribosomal RNA gene and the results were obtained for analysis using bioinformatics of 16S data. Our findings suggest that the time of year have potential effects on the composition of the airborne bacterial community.