Microbial, environmental and anthropogenic factors influencing the indoor microbiome of the built environment

Abstract

A built environment is a human‐made environment providing surroundings for human occupancy, activities, and settlement. It is supposed to safeguard humans from all undesirable and harmful pollutants; however, indoor concentrations of some pollutants are much greater than that of the outdoors. Bioaerosols infiltrate from the outdoors in addition to many indoor sources of bioaerosols including the use of various chemicals as well as activities like cooking, smoking, cleaning, or even normal movement. They are also associated with a number of serious health concerns. Various ecological factors associated with the generation, the persistence as well as the dispersal of these microbial components of indoor bioaerosols, are discussed in this review, that have not been considered all together till now. The factors like microbial taxa, environmental factors, and anthropogenic activities (human occupancy, activities, and impact of urbanization) are addressed in the review. Effects of both indoor environmental factors like architectural design, lighting, ventilation, temperature, humidity, indoor/outdoor ratio, particulate matter, indoor chemistry as well as outdoor environmental factors like geography, seasons, and meteorology on the microbial concentrations have been discussed. Efforts are underway to design selective pressures for microbes to create a healthy symbiotic built microbiome as the “right” indoor microbiome is a “healthy” indoor microbiome.