Methane oxidation genes are only present in bioaerosols at sites with high methane concentrations
- 1Simon Fraser University
Abstract
Airborne microorganisms connect Earth's habitats, yet a central question in microbial ecology remains: do airborne communities simply reflect what is released from the surfaces below, or does local environmental context shape them? Methane oxidation offers a tractable test, because methane monooxygenase genes are restricted to defined bacterial lineages and methane is directly measurable. Pairing aerosol and underlying soil or water metagenomes across a 35-fold methane range, we show that these genes were present in every soil and water sample, yet detected in aerosols only above the landfill and dairy farm, and not above the three wetlands. The soil did not predict the air; instead, gene detection tracked local methane availability. Aerosol cell concentrations spanned 1,000 to 1,000,000 cells per cubic metre, and bacterial communities tracked their sources whereas eukaryotes were enriched in spore-dispersing fungi. Predicting what airborne microbiomes carry will therefore require accounting for local environmental context, not passive dispersal alone.
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BibTeX
@misc{park2026methane,
title = {{Methane oxidation genes are only present in bioaerosols at sites with high methane concentrations}},
author = {J. Park and N. H. Martens and S. M. B. Krause and A. Kumar and N. Zimmerman and N. Borduas-Dedekind and S. J. Fowler},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.13.758901},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.13.758901v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Methane oxidation genes are only present in bioaerosols at sites with high methane concentrations
AU - J. Park
AU - N. H. Martens
AU - S. M. B. Krause
AU - A. Kumar
AU - N. Zimmerman
AU - N. Borduas-Dedekind
AU - S. J. Fowler
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.13.758901
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.13.758901v1
AB - Airborne microorganisms connect Earth's habitats, yet a central question in microbial ecology remains: do airborne communities simply reflect what is released from the surfaces below, or does local environmental context shape them? Methane oxidation offers a tractable test, because methane monooxygenase genes are restricted to defined bacterial lineages and methane is directly measurable. Pairing aerosol and underlying soil or water metagenomes across a 35-fold methane range, we show that these genes were present in every soil and water sample, yet detected in aerosols only above the landfill and dairy farm, and not above the three wetlands. The soil did not predict the air; instead, gene detection tracked local methane availability. Aerosol cell concentrations spanned 1,000 to 1,000,000 cells per cubic metre, and bacterial communities tracked their sources whereas eukaryotes were enriched in spore-dispersing fungi. Predicting what airborne microbiomes carry will therefore require accounting for local environmental context, not passive dispersal alone.
ER -