Combined 16S and Internal Transcribed Spacer analysis revealed the effect of time on microbial community in animal house

The outbreak of COVID-19 reminds people that aerosols have an important impact on health. The concentration and composition of microbial aerosol in livestock and poultry houses are closely related to the environmental conditions of livestock and poultry houses, and also related to the healthy growth of live-stock and poultry. In our study, 16S and ITS sequencing techniques were used to analyze the relation and difference of bacteria and fungi in the air samples of a chicken house. At the age of 7 to 42 d, the operation classification unit (OTU) numbers of bacteria and fungi identified in our results were 2,398 and 986, respectively, of which the shared OTU numbers were 410 and 141, respectively. At the phylum level, Firmicutes, Proteo-bacteria, and Actinomycetes were the 3 most abundant bacterial phyla, and Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes were the top 2 phyla in fungi. At the genus level, 7 differential fungal genera were identified, including Debaryomyces, Trichosporon, Wallemia, Aspergillus, Nigrospora, Fusarium, and Vishniacozyma. Compared with other bacterial genera, Lactobacillus, Cetobacterium, and Romboutsia had the highest abundance (more than 5%). The result showed that the Alpha diversity and Beta diversity of fungi were significantly different in different growing periods. However, only Beta diversity showed significant differences among bacteria. In gen-eral, the bacterial and fungal diversity of microbial aero-sols in the chicken house increased significantly at the age of 7 to 42 d. And the evenness and richness of air -borne fungal communities also increased obviously. In a word, we must pay attention to the complex community composition in the chicken house, this is closely related to animal health and the health of surrounding resi-dents. The cooperation and communication between bacteria and fungi in PM2.5 samples provides a new ref-erence to analyze the influence of microbial aerosol.