Culture collection from air

Isolation of organisms collected from air has allowed us to create a culture collection of greater than 100 fungi & 100 bacteria and explore the possibility of novel air specific organisms. We have been able to create high-quality, platinum-grade genome assembles from next-generation whole genome sequencing (WGS) combining long-read sequencing technologies with Illumina sequencing data, for deposition into community databases. These sequenced genomes help to strengthen the reference databases for metagenomic taxa identification. Continued characterization of these genomes via SEM, functional genome annotation, and culture growth across different media, has helped us to investigate characteristics which may be specific to survival or transport of organisms in air. It is this enquiry along with the comparison against our metagenomic, time-resolved datasets, which helps fuel our continued curiosity of the question of, "What is in air?"