Comparative study of shared environments revealed an increased microbiome diversity of richness and abundance in open environments and evenness in closed environments

Abstract

Microbes are ubiquitous organisms that have been familiarly associated with human health and welfare, and human-bacteria interactions can shape the microbial makeup of the broader environment. While there has been extensive research conducted on the human microbiome, few studies have explored human microbiome dynamics as a function of open human social practices, and even fewer studies have explored how confinement parameters as extreme as space exploration simulation can impact the microbiome. Therefore, we aimed to compare two separate datasets modeling an open and confined environment, to investigate whether microbiome diversity differed between the two environments. Our study found that open environments have greater phylogenetic diversity and taxonomic richness at the genus level compared to confined environments, whereas confined environments have greater evenness indices compared to open environments. As a result, we also discovered that the top 20 differentially abundant genera between the datasets were all lower in abundance within our model for confined environments. These findings demonstrate that open and confined environments differ in microbiome diversity.