Question: What specific traits do Alien subspecies take from their hosts?

I asked myself this after trying to figure out what happened to the Deacon at the end of Prometheus, as well as all the Engineer chest bursters that presumably roamed LV-226 at one point...

One thing that came mind was that the Engineers were terraforming and humans wore space suits suggesting that the atmosphere was not suitable for them to breathe. Is it possible that the chest bursters take on the inability to breathe the same atmosphere as its host? Meaning that they may have eventually suffocated when straying too far from the installation? Since the Deacon was in a broken ship outside maybe the same thing happened to it? This could be the reason the Engineers chose to cultivate 'the goo' on that planet (as a type of containment system), so if there ever was an uncontollable outbreak, the resulting subspecies would eventually die out due to the lack of breathable air if they tried to leave and spread…

I think to know for sure we need to know how long facehuggers can survive outside of the egg before they implant the embryo that 'fuses' with a hosts DNA. Does anyone know this?

I read that the facehuggers can survive outside the egg for roughly 120 hours before persishing suggesting they don't fully sustain themselves through breathing the atmosphere (although this was from an AVP forum so I don't know if it should count).

What do you guys think? Do Aliens selectively take on traits of its host, or do they also inherit limitations so to speak. Can Aliens breathe in any atmosphere or do they even breathe at all?