Moisture and material shape microbial communities in the built environment through disturbance productivity relationships
The built environment houses diverse microbial communities whose diversity and composition differ among building materials and environmental conditions. We manipulated moisture (constant or repeated wet dry cycling) on three common building materials to test predictions about alpha and beta diversity in relation to environmental disturbance. Coupons of different building materials, medium density fiberboard, gypsum wallboard and oriented strand board (OSB), were sterilized before passive inoculation, then kept wet or periodically air-dried before rewetting. Microbial communities were sampled using swabs every 14 days for 7-week period. Productivity was measured using bacterial cell counts, fungal hyphal length, and fungal spore density, and microbial diversity determined via community amplicon sequencing using universal bacterial (16S) and fungal (ITS) primers.