Remedial and cleaning efforts were associated with a decrease in the diversity of dustborne fungi in one of the buildings. This, as well as the disappearance of certain material-associated species, supports the assumption that remediation was effective in the removal of the fungal burden contributed by indoor mold growth sources. In the second location, clear indications of an intervention effect on the

diversity were not seen. Due to a delay in remediation EPZ5676 schedules the interval between completion of the remediation and post-remediation sampling was short, which may explain the increase in the abundance of material-associated fungi in post-remediation dust; despite efforts to prevent the spread of contamination, fungal particles aerosolized during remediation may have spread, not being sufficiently removed by post-remedial cleaning. In addition, there was an unexpected diversification in the reference

building’s Selleckchem Alpelisib microbial profile, which undermined the case-control comparison. The diversification may have been caused by an increase in the transfer of fungal material from outdoors. This hypothesis is supported by the appearance of many probably outdoor-related phylotypes in the clone libraries. Yet the diversification included many species that may proliferate indoors, and thus the occurrence of water damage in the reference building cannot be ruled out. In Location-2, the considerable distance between the index and reference buildings also challenged the comparison. These

findings highlight the strong variation in indoor mycobiota within and between buildings, the uniqueness of individual buildings’ microbial profiles and the complexity of potential sources. For these reasons, the choice and matching of reference building for each study building is crucial. In general, our findings are only suggestive due to the deep normal variation between buildings and the small building number, and should be further examined with larger data sets. Glutathione peroxidase Comparison of methods Of all methods tested, clone library analysis provided the most thorough inventory of fungal diversity in settled dust. Nevertheless, a comparison of the sequencing results with qPCR results (a technique with selleck products higher analytical sensitivity) showed that many species present in the samples were not represented by the libraries. The species only detected by qPCR tended to be those of lower qPCR cell counts, whereas highly abundant species were much better represented in the clone libraries. Taking into account the semiquantitative nature of clone library results and the presently deficient species-level information of potential building-associated fungi, the usefulness of clone library sequencing for assessment of building sources remains uncertain. This uncertainty also arises from the universal nature of the technique, i.e. its sensitivity in detecting background diversity acting as a dampening factor on the ability to detect shifts in indicator species.