Abstract
Arthropods are recognised as potential mechanical and biological vectors
for infectious diseases in outdoor environments. However, a
comprehensive understanding of the indoor arthropod community diversity
and of the role that their associated microbiota may have as disease
vectors is largely unexplored. Here, we study the arthropod community
and the associated microbiota diversity of twenty indoor environments,
sampled over a period of twelve months from urban and suburban
households by citizen scientists in the West Midlands (UK). We compare
the arthropods diversity between environments and over the sampling
months. We characterize the exogenous (exoskeleton) and endogenous (gut)
bacterial communities associated with all specimens of arthropods
actively captured using both a traditional culture-based and an unbiased
metabarcoding approach. For the first time, we describe the exogenous
and endogenous microbiota composition and diversity of 14 arthropod
families found in indoor environments. We find that both the exogenous
and the endogenous microbiota are potential carriers of human
opportunistic pathogens, with potential implications for public health.
We discover that many bacteria families are shared across the exogenous
microbiota of arthropods, likely influenced by the bacteria present in
the environment. Conversely, the endogenous microbiota composition is
unique to the arthropod families, and likely genetically determined. We
show that the metabarcoding unbiased approach is a superior tool to
characterize the microbiota associated with each arthropod family. This
study provides new insights into bacterial carriage in household
arthropods as potential reservoirs of infectious disease.