Study on Microbial Diversity of Clothing in Maternal and Infant Population

Abstract With the improvement of Chinese people's living standards, the maintenance of infants and young children is becoming more and more sophisticated. Coupled with the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic in the past few years, mother-to-child families have paid unprecedented attention and expectations to household appliances with sterilization and disinfection functions. In addition to washing machines as household clothing care equipment, clothing care machines with further sterilization, drying, and disinfection functions for infant and young children's clothing are gradually entering households, especially in southern China during the rainy season. In order to thoroughly solve the problem of sterilization of clothing from the source, the distribution of microbial contamination of clothing should be fully investigated. At present, there are few systematic studies on microbial community structure in clothing in China. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the microbial community structure in Chinese maternal and infant household clothing and explore the key factors affecting the microbial community structure of clothing. A plate culture method and a high-throughput sequencing technology are utilized to comprehensively analyze the community structure of the microorganism in the clothes of the mother and infant. The Chao and Shannon index were used as indicators to explore the key factors affecting the microbial community structure of clothing by one-way analysis of variance. In this study, 149 strains of microorganisms were isolated from 24 clothing samples of mothers and infants, including 102 strains of bacteria, covering 16 genera. The bacteria with higher isolation frequency and wider distribution were Staphylococcus and Micrococcus, Moraxella; 47 strains of fungi covering 24 genera were isolated and the fungi with higher isolation frequency and wider distribution were Cladosporium, Alteraria, Rhodotorula. At present, the sterilization technology of clothing care machine has not been fully investigated in combination with the distribution of clothing microorganisms. Based on the specific distribution of microorganisms in clothing and the types of microorganisms contained, clothing care machines can provide more targeted sterilization treatment for clothing. This study will help to thoroughly address the sterilization and disinfection of microorganisms in clothing from the source.