Assessing the risk of human pathogens in the environment is crucial for controlling the spread of diseases and safeguarding human health. However, conducting a thorough assessment of low-abundance pathogens in highly complex environmental microbial communities remains challenging. This study compiled a comprehensive catalog of 247 human-pathogenic bacterial taxa from global biosafety agencies and identified more than 78 million genome-specific markers (GSMs) from their 17,470 sequenced genomes. Subsequently, we analyzed these pathogens’ types, abundance, and diversity within 474 shotgun metagenomic sequences obtained from diverse environmental sources. The results revealed that among the four habitats studied (air, water, soil, and sediment), the detection rate, diversity, and abundance of detectable pathogens in the air all exceeded those in the other three habitats. Air, sediment, and water environments exhibited identical dominant taxa, indicating that these human pathogens may have unique environmental vectors for their transmission or survival. Furthermore, we observed the impact of human activities on the environmental risk posed by these pathogens, where greater amounts of human activities significantly increased the abundance of human pathogenic bacteria, especially in water and air. These findings have remarkable implications for the environmental risk assessment of human pathogens, providing valuable insights into their presence and distribution across different habitats.

中文翻译：

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除了水和土壤：空气成为人类病原体的主要储存库


评估环境中人类病原体的风险对于控制疾病传播和维护人类健康至关重要。然而，对高度复杂的环境微生物群落中的低丰度病原体进行彻底评估仍然具有挑战性。这项研究编制了来自全球生物安全机构的 247 种人类致病细菌分类群的综合目录，并从 17,470 个已测序的基因组中鉴定出超过 7800 万个基因组特异性标记 (GSM)。随后，我们分析了从不同环境来源获得的 474 个鸟枪法宏基因组序列中这些病原体的类型、丰度和多样性。结果显示，在所研究的四个生境（空气、水、土壤和沉积物）中，空气中可检测病原体的检出率、多样性和丰度均超过其他三个生境。空气、沉积物和水环境表现出相同的优势类群，表明这些人类病原体可能具有独特的传播或生存环境载体。此外，我们观察了人类活动对这些病原体造成的环境风险的影响，大量的人类活动显着增加了人类致病菌的丰度，特别是在水和空气中。这些发现对人类病原体的环境风险评估具有显着的意义，为了解它们在不同栖息地的存在和分布提供了宝贵的见解。