BACKGROUND Petroleum hydrocarbon pollution has become a global concern, and seeking an appropriate strategy for treatment of petroleum hydrocarbons is necessary, especially under saline–alkaline conditions. In this study, microbial consortia capable of utilizing low‐molecular‐weight aliphatic petroleum hydrocarbons (n‐decane, n‐dodecane and n‐hexadecane) as the sole carbon source were enriched from crude‐oil‐contaminated soils, and their community profiles were evaluated using high‐throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene. RESULTS The microbial consortia were able to degrade 5–100 mL L−1 n‐decane, n‐dodecane and n‐hexadecane by approximately 37.6–97.3%, 52.1–93.2% and 72.4–96.5%, respectively. The consortia also exhibited alkali‐tolerant and moderately salt‐resistant capability, which enabled them to retain high degradation efficiencies of hydrocarbons within a pH range of 7.0–11.0 and salinities of 5–20 g L−1 NaCl. High‐throughput sequencing analysis demonstrated that Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, Achromobacter, Mesorhizobium and Brucella were the core genera (average > 1%) in the consortia, which were more enriched under alkaline condition (pH 11.0). PICRUSt (phylogenetic investigation of communities by reconstruction of unobserved states) prediction revealed a rich set of metabolic functions involved in degradation of hydrocarbons and aromatics, and the critical functional gene, alkane 1‐monooxygenase, was more abundant in the microbial consortia under alkaline condition. CONCLUSIONS The results suggested that these alkali–salt‐tolerant microbial consortia could be a promising candidate for bioremediation of petroleum hydrocarbons. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry (SCI)

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Earth‐abundant metal oxides/hydroxides have recently been identified as promising catalysts for oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in alkaline media, while the overall efficiency is still limited by the sluggish kinetics. Therefore, searching for facile and effective method to prepare composition and morphology tunable catalyst, as well as understanding its reactivity are urgent tasks. Here, we report a hydrothermal etching strategy for the synthesis of Fe doped Co oxides/hydroxide hybrid catalyst with hierarchical nanosheet array architecture. The as‐obtained catalyst shows an overpotential of 219 mV without iR compensation at 10 mA/cm2 and a low Tafel slope of 46.4 mV/dec, surpassing the other control catalysts in this work and most similar catalysts in literature. Comprehensive studies confirm that both composition and morphology can be rationally tuned by adjusting the hydrothermal etching parameters, and the improvement of activity is attributed to the highly active Fe doped Co oxides/hydroxide species together with the unique 3D hierarchical structure.