Development of a simple tool for guiding mold inspection and remediation in U.S. homes

摘要

The goal of this research is to provide a technically defensible, economically-practical tool for defining the dampness-associated fungal contribution to a building's fungal ecology. We hypothesize that the fundamental data contained in home fungal community DNA sequence analyses can be leveraged to build databases and indices to accurately guide home mold inspection and restoration. Specific objectives include the following: (1) Conduct an extensive, nation-wide field campaign to sample fungi in water damaged and non-water damaged homes; and (2) Leverage this nationwide fungal ecology data to produce indices that quantitatively define the contributions of dampness-associated fungi in homes across the U.S. The sampling plan involves 12 representative metropolitan areas, a total of 120 homes, and 780 samples. Three categories of samples have been collected including: (1) settled dust from homes with no history of water damage or visible mold ("no mold" home dust), (2) settled dust from homes with documented water damage and visible mold ("mold" home dust), and (3) direct surface samples from building materials with visible fungal growth ("direct mold"). Preliminary results from fungal sequencing has found compositional differences between the ecological profiles of the fungal samples as a function of sample type. There exist a significant difference in richness between direct mold, mold dust, and no mold dust samples. The direct mold samples have a lower richness than the dust samples from moldy or non-moldy homes. Geography, defined as specific climate regions, also drives some of the changes in fungal community structure. Taking these relationships into account, comparisons between mold, no mold, and direct mold indicate even larger differences, suggesting the important role of geography in obscuring the differences between mold and no mold samples.