Station and train surface microbiomes of Mexico City’s metro (subway/underground)

Abstract

The metro is one of the more representative urban transportation systems of Mexico City, and it transports approximately 4.5 million commuters every day. Large crowds promote the exchange of microbes between humans. In this study, we determined the bacterial diversity profile of the Mexico City metro by massive sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. We identified a total of 50,174 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and 1058 genera. The metro microbiome was dominated by the phylum Actinobacteria and by the genera Cutibacterium (15%) (C. acnes 13%), Corynebacterium (13%), Streptococcus (9%), and Staphylococcus (5%) (S. epidermidis; 4%), reflecting the microbe composition of healthy human skin. The metro likely microbial sources were skin, dust, saliva, and vaginal, with no fecal contribution detected. A total of 420 bacterial genera were universal to the twelve metro lines tested, and those genera contributed to 99.10% of the abundance. The annual 1.6 billion ridership makes this public transport a main hub for microbe-host-environment interactions. Finally, this study shows that the microbial composition of the Mexico City metro comes from a mixture of environmental and human sources and that commuters are exposed to healthy composition of the human microbiota.