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Exploring local and regional contribution to airborne bacterial communities in the Antarctic Peninsula

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Abstract

Understanding microbial dispersion in the atmosphere is essential for studying microbial biogeography and ecosystem dynamics under global change. Airborne bacterial communities, shaped by exchanges between atmosphere and Earth’s surface, can originate from diverse sources and vary with meteorological conditions and air mass trajectories. In this study, we assessed airborne microbial communities in Antarctica at regional and local scales. Air samples were collected during the austral summer at two Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPAs): Byers Peninsula (Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands) and Avian Island (Marguerite Bay). Bacterial composition was analysed through 16S rRNA gene sequencing using amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). Additionally, back-trajectories of the sampled air parcels were simulated with HYSPLIT. A core community was identified in 80% of Byers Peninsula samples, representing 57.91% of total ASVs. Notably, 79.4% of ASVs matched soil bacteria from the same location, suggesting a strong influence of local sources. Communities from Byers Peninsula and Avian Island showed low overall similarity. However, one sample from Byers resembled the Avian sample, likely due to similar air mass back-trajectories. These findings suggest that airborne bacterial communities are shaped by both local ecosystems, and broader regional or continental processes, such as long-range trajectories carrying microorganisms from distant locations.

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Data availability

The air sequences generated in this study are available in GenBank under BioProject accession number PRJNA1165500.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the members of field teams from MICROAIRPOLAR projects Sergi González and David Velázquez, Unidad de Tecnología Marina (UTM-CSIC), and crews of BIO Hespérides (Spanish Navy) and B/O Sarmiento de Gamboa (CSIC) for the logistic support in Antarctic campaigns. The authors acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the Centro de Computación Científica at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (CCC-UAM), the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model, the Norwegian Polar Institute for the Quantarctica package, and Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET) for providing meteorological data from Juan Carlos I station. Special thanks to Pablo Sanz and Sergi González for their support in obtaining back-trajectories of air masses.

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), Grants PID2020-116520RB-I00 and CTM2016-79741-R. SG was supported by a PIPF-contract fellowship (PIPF-2022/ECO-25833) from Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid government’s (Spain).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Antonio Quesada and Ana Justel.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Sofía Galbán & Antonio Quesada

  2. Department of Plant and Microbial Ecology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 55455, USA

    Pablo Almela

  3. Department of Mathematics, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Madrid, Spain

    Ana Justel

Authors

  1. Sofía Galbán
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  2. Pablo Almela
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  3. Antonio Quesada
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Contributions

S.G.: Conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. P.A.: Conceptualization, methodology, writing—review and editing. A.Q.: Conceptualization, investigation, methodology, funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision, validation, writing—review and editing. A.J.: Conceptualization, investigation, methodology, funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision, validation, writing—review and editing.

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Antonio Quesada.

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Galbán, S., Almela, P., Quesada, A. et al. Exploring local and regional contribution to airborne bacterial communities in the Antarctic Peninsula.
Sci Rep (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-32162-z

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Keywords

  • Aerobiology
  • Antarctica
  • Bacteria
  • Core community
  • Biogeography
  • Air mass back-trajectories

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