The composition of microbial communities can provide critical information about their local environment, whether that environment is the human gut1, an airplane cabin2, or a freshwater lake.3 As abundance of specific species rise and fall, they can signal disease and/or promote pathogenesis.

HudsonAlpha Discovery enables a broad range of microbiome studies with our metagenomic sequencing services, including whole genome shotgun metagenomic sequencing4 and metatranscriptomics.3

Whether you need end-to-end support or a subset of what we can provide, we’ll help you customize a service project to best meet your study objectives.

Here are a few examples of what we offer:

The Airplane Cabin Microbiome

Microb Ecol. 2019; 77(1): 87–95. PMCID: PMC6318343.

In this study, completed when the HudsonAlpha Discovery lab was still the HudsonAlpha Institute Genomic Services Lab, our metagenomic sequencing services supported a study of microbial communities in different areas of an airplane cabin, including the air and touch surfaces, and a comparison of these same sampling areas on several flights.

Their findings: The authors found significant airplane-to-airplane variability and different signatures for air versus touch surfaces with the majority of microbes being human commensals or non-pathogenic.

The significance of this work: “Despite the uniqueness of the airplane cabin as a built environment, our findings are surprisingly consistent with other recent studies of the microbiome of built environments. This consistency is reassuring in light of frequent sensationalistic media stories about dangerous germs found on airplanes. For this reason, there is no more risk from 4 to 5 hours spent in an airplane cabin than 4–5 hours spent in an office, all other exposures being the same. Our microbiome characterization also provides a baseline for non-crisis level airplane microbiome conditions.”2