The healthy airway mycobiome in individuals of Asian descent

Abstract

Fungal infection in association with lung disease has emerged as a significant clinical problem. Owing to a ubiquitous environmental abundance, fungal spores, inhaled daily, can reach even the smallest airways. Although healthy individuals have effective immune mechanisms to clear this, individuals with anatomically abnormal airways and chronic respiratory disease (CRD) such as bronchiectasis are at higher risk of colonization and complications. Use of high-throughput sequencing has allowed insight into the pulmonary microbiome. This is well characterized for bacteria, in both healthy individuals and those with CRD; however, analysis of the fungal microbiome (the mycobiome) has lagged because of technical challenges. Despite the existence of fungi in healthy and diseased states, most published work to date has focused on CRD, in which judgments on fungal identity and burden may be confounded by use of inhaled corticosteroids and the underlying disease. This highlights a critical need to understand the airway mycobiome in healthy (nondiseased) individuals. Although the effect of aging on lung microbiomes remains to be established, our recent work illustrates that aging may potentially associate with specific microbes. Here, for the first time, we characterize the airway mycobiome in healthy subject pairs (first-degree relatives) of Asian descent.