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To date, most of what is know of indoor fungal communities has been determined by characterizing isolates which can be cultured on media. The vast majority of this research has been conducted in the developed world. While we may have succeeded in identifying some of the species correlated to human health issues, there is still much to be learned about community composition and geographic variance of indoor fungi throughout the globe. With collaborators from Thailand, Canada, South Africa, Mexico and the United States, we are using pyrosequencing technology (454) to generate the most complete characterization of these diverse communities so far. Our first data set revealed fungal diversity in settled indoor dust from nearly 100 samples from every inhabited continent and Micronesia. We are using dust as a model system to analyze global patterns of distance-decay of assemblage similarity, and to test the hypothesis that fungal species distribution is scaled to substrate.
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