Production Phase Affects the Bioaerosol Microbial Composition and Functional Potential in Swine Confinement Buildings

In the present study, air samples from different types of swine confinement buildings (SCBs), which exclusively housed weaning piglets (WP), finishing pigs (FP), farrowing sows (FS), gestating sows (GS), and breeding boars (BB), respectively, were used to study the effects of the production phase on the taxonomical composition and functional potential of microbial communities in the SCBs bioaerosols (airborne particles that are biological in origin). Whole metagenome shotgun sequencing, which is the untargeted (‘shotgun’) sequencing of all microbial genomes (‘metagenome’) present in a sample, was adopted to profile the bioaerosol microbiome (full collection of genes of all the microbes in a community). The results showed that bioaerosol microbiome of BB shared a high similarity with GS, and WP bioaerosol microbiome was more similar to FP than other types of SCBs. The findings of this study suggested that the production phase of pigs contributes to the variations of SCBs bioaerosol microbiome