Plant flowers transmit various bio-agents through air
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ant flowers transmit various bio-agents through air Siyu XU & Maosheng YAO
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State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China Received January 20, 2020; revised April 10, 2020; accepted May 11, 2020; published online July 23, 2020
Abstract Growing air pollution, known as “April snow”, by fluffy catkins from plant flowering was frequently observed during the Spring time in China. Current efforts mainly focus on controlling catkin release, while their public health and environmental impacts are unknown. Here, using culturing, microscopic and sequence methods we found that the flying catkins carry a 4 5 significant amount of bio-agents (bacteria, fungal, viruses, and pollens), e.g., up to 6.33×10 bacterial and 7.46×10 fungal cells per catkin. Abundant pollens from plants were also found riding on the flying catkins. For collected fluffy catkins, bacterial Paracoccus, Massilia, fungal Ophiocordyceps, Arthrocladiella, pollen Robina, Pickeringia, Pinus, and viral family Genomoviridae, to name a few, were found to be dominant. With infection and allergic potentials, the detected microbial structures on the fluffy catkins were different from those of local air, varying from one location to another. Being not just white pollution, flying plant fluffy catkins were discovered here also acting as a cloud of biological agents, and further actions need to be taken urgently to understand and limit their environmental and ecological consequences. Keywords Citation:
Plant flowering, Flying fluffy catkins, Bio-agents, Transmission, Air pollution
Xu S, Yao M. 2020. Plant flowers transmit various bio-agents through air. Science China Earth Sciences, 63, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-020-96292
1. Introduction Exposure to airborne bio-agents such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and pollens can present a tremendous toll on humans by causing respiratory infection, allergy and toxic reactions. Globally, acute lower respiratory infections, particularly from respiratory syncytial virus, are one of the leading causes of death for children under age five (Shi et al., 2015), e.g., 1.8 million of deaths for 2016 alone (GBD, 2017). For China, the lower respiratory infection was the most frequent cause of child mortality in 2008 (Rudan et al., 2010). The responsible agents include bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumonia and Pneumococcus, fungi and viruses (Shi et al., 2017; Barac et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2018). In addition to infectious agents, airborne pollens were also shown to be associated with cardiovascular, chronic obstructive pul* Corresponding author (email: [email protected])
monary, pneumonia and allergic respiratory diseases (Brunekreef et al., 2000; D’Amato et al., 2019). In Europe, prevalence of pollen allergy is presently estimated up to 40% (D’Amato et al., 2007); while for China, pollen was described to be the most commonly reported allergen (47.8%) in a survey conducted in 11 major cities (Zhang et al., 2009).
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