Background: The distribution of microorganisms, and especially pathogens, over airborne particles of different sizes has been ignored to a large extent, but it could have significant implications regarding the dispersion of these microorganisms across the planet, thus affecting human health. Objectives: We examined the microbial quality of the aerosols over the eastern Mediterranean region during an African storm to determine the size distribution of microorganisms in the air. Methods: We used a five-stage cascade impactor for bioaerosol collection in a coastal city on the eastern Mediterranean Sea during a north African dust storm. Bacterial communities associated with aerosol particles of six different size ranges were characterized following molecular culture–independent methods, regardless of the cell culturability (analysis of 16S rRNA genes). Results: All 16S rDNA clone libraries were diverse, including sequences commonly found in soil and marine ecosystems. Spore-forming bacteria such as Firmicutes dominated large particle sizes (> 3.3 μm), whereas clones affiliated with Actinobacteria (found commonly in soil) and Bacteroidetes (widely distributed in the environment) gradually increased their abundance in aerosol particles of reduced size (< 3.3 μm). A large portion of the clones detected at respiratory particle sizes (< 3.3 μm) were phylogenetic neighbors to human pathogens that have been linked to several diseases. Conclusions: The presence of aerosolized bacteria in small size particles may have significant implications to human health via intercontinental transportation of pathogens.

Natural Products (NP) are essential for the discovery of novel drugs and products for numerous biotechnological applications. The NP discovery process is expensive and time-consuming, having as major hurdles dereplication (early identification of known compounds) and structure elucidation, particularly the determination of the absolute configuration of metabolites with stereogenic centers. This review comprehensively focuses on recent technological and instrumental advances, highlighting the development of methods that alleviate these obstacles, paving the way for accelerating NP discovery towards biotechnological applications. Herein, we emphasize the most innovative high-throughput tools and methods for advancing bioactivity screening, NP chemical analysis, dereplication, metabolite profiling, metabolomics, genome sequencing and/or genomics approaches, databases, bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and three-dimensional NP structure elucidation.