Relevance of plant and fungal DNA metabarcoding in aerobiology

Aerobiology studies biological particles present in the air of both indoor and outdoor environments. In the past few years, the application of molecular techniques has considerably improved the knowledge of organismal diversity in air samples and highlighted its ecological and clinical importance. DNA metabarcoding in particular has been recently applied worldwide to describe the biological composition of airborne bacteria, fungi and plants. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of those aerobiology studies which, in the past few years, have applied DNA metabarcoding techniques. We focus specifically on researches including plants and fungi and review the multiplicity of experimental plans, sampling procedures, laboratory processing methods, the choice of the DNA barcode(s), the selection of sequencing platforms and bioinformatics pipelines for the comparability of data obtained from multiple origins.