Rodo, X. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

Climatic Influence on COVID-19: Investigating the Role of Temperature and Humidity in the Spread of the Omicron Variant

Understanding how climate modulates infectious disease dynamics is critical for anticipating epidemic patterns. This study examines the association between climatological variables--specifically temperature and relative humidity--and the incidence of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) during its global wave (2021-2022). Using global epidemiological and climate data, we applied Scale-Dependent Correlation (SDC) analysis to detect transient, scale-specific associations across regions and periods. We identified consistent negative correlations between incidence and both temperature and humidity, especially in mid-latitudes during colder months. These findings were compared with predictions from stochastic population-based compartmental models incorporating climate-dependent transmission parameters. Among the tested formulations, the temperature-based model achieved the best fit to observed case trajectories. Our results highlight a robust climatological influence on Omicron transmission dynamics and underscore the importance of integrating climate indicators into epidemic modeling and preparedness strategies.

systems biology↗

bioRxiv2023

Air monitoring by nanopore sequencing

While the air microbiome and its diversity are essential for human health and ecosystem resilience, comprehensive air microbial diversity monitoring has remained rare, so that little is known about the air microbiomes composition, distribution, or functionality. Here we show that nanopore sequencing-based metagenomics can robustly assess the air microbiome in combination with active air sampling through liquid impingement and tailored computational analysis. We provide fast and portable laboratory and computational approaches for air microbiome profiling, which we leverage to robustly assess the taxonomic composition of the core air microbiome of a controlled greenhouse environment and of a natural outdoor environment. We show that long-read sequencing can resolve species-level annotations and specific ecosystem functions through de novo metagenomic assemblies despite the low amount of fragmented DNA used as an input for nanopore sequencing. We then apply our pipeline to assess the diversity and variability of an urban air microbiome, using Barcelona, Spain, as an example; this randomized experiment gives first insights into the presence of highly stable location-specific air microbiomes within the citys boundaries, and showcases the robust microbial assessments that can be achieved through automatable, fast, and portable nanopore sequencing technology.

molecular biology↗