Table 1.
Demographics of the 50 subjects enrolled in the study.
The information was summarized based on questionnaires filled in by the subjects during enrollment or each visit. Data on chronic and acute illnesses were also collected from the subjects.
Fig 1.
Sample collection from 50 human subjects.
Three swabs (nasal, oropharyngeal, and nasopharyngeal) were collected from each volunteer (subject numbers 14–63) during each of two visits (1/2) in every quarter (i.e., S1–S4). Green diamond symbols show swab collection dates. Red bars denote flu shot vaccination dates (26 subjects). Black bars denote Flu Mist vaccination dates (19 subjects). The dots on the X-axis filled in with color show musician types: Empty, non-musician (11); Green, pianist or conductor (2); Purple, percussionist (5); Cyan, vocalist (4); Yellow, violinist (3); Gray, wind instrumentalist (25).
Fig 2.
Bacterial community composition of respiratory microbiota in 36 human subjects.
Bacterial genera with an average relative abundance of ≥0.5% across the 36 samples are shown. Reads that were classified at the higher taxonomic levels other than genus are denoted as “other”. Each sample name includes the quarter number S1–S4 (first digit), visit 1 or 2 (second digit), subject number (last three digits), and type of swab (A, anterior nares [top panel]; N, nasopharynx [middle panel]; T, oropharynx [bottom panel]).
Table 2.
Major bacterial taxa of human respiratory microbiota.
Analysis of data (quarter S1 visit 1) from 36 subjects with samples available for all four quarters, showing the percentage of samples with a relative abundance of ≥0.5% or ≥1.0%. Data are shown in bold for percentage of samples ≥50%.
Fig 3.
Variation in average α-diversity as a function of upper respiratory region and time.
Within-subject α-diversity values for 30 subjects that had a complete set of 24 swabs and at least 3000 reads per sample were computed by using the Shannon entropy and averaged over each region and time point. Samples from the anterior nares (A) are red, samples from the nasopharynx (N) are blue, and samples from the oropharynx samples (T) are green. Plotting is performed using the ‘boxplot’ function with the standard (default) parameters. The filled bars (boxes) represent the 25th (top) and 75th (bottom) percentiles of the samples. The error bars cover the samples to the furthest distance within the error range. By default, an outlier is a value that is more than 1.5 times the interquartile range away from the top or bottom of the box. The diamond symbol represents the median of the samples.
Fig 4.
Variation in β-diversity as a function of upper respiratory regions.
Between-subject β-diversity values were computed for 30 subjects that had a complete set of 24 swabs and at least 3000 reads per sample. The weighted UniFrac distance was used in the principal coordinate analysis of the distance matrices between the respiratory regions.