Community Dynamics and Activity of Ammonia-Oxidizing Prokaryotes in Intertidal Sediments of the Yangtze Estuary

Abstract

d Diversity, abundance, and activity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) were investigated using the ammonia monooxygenase ␣ subunit (amoA) in the intertidal sediments of the Yangtze Estuary. Generally, AOB had a lower diversity of amoA genes than did AOA in this study. Clone library analysis revealed great spatial variations in both AOB and AOA communities along the estuary. The UniFrac distance matrix showed that all the AOB communities and 6 out of 7 AOA communities in the Yangtze Estuary were statistically indistinguishable between summer and winter. The studied AOB and AOA community structures were observed to correlate with environmental parameters, of which salinity, pH, ammonium, total phosphorus, and organic carbon had significant correlations with the composition and distribution of both communities. Also, the AOA communities were significantly correlated with sediment clay content. Quantitative PCR (qPCR) results indicated that the abundance of AOB amoA genes was greater than that of AOA amoA genes in 10 of the 14 samples analyzed in this study. Potential nitrification rates were significantly greater in summer than in winter and had a significant negative correlation with salinity. In addition, potential nitrification rates were correlated strongly only with archaeal amoA gene abundance and not with bacterial amoA gene abundance. However, no significant differences were observed between rates measured with and without ampicillin (AOB inhibitor). These results implied that archaea might play a more important role in mediating the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite in the Yangtze estuarine sediments.

Efficiency promotion and its mechanisms of simultaneous nitrogen and phosphorus removal in stormwater biofilters

“…In turn, the AP could favor the microorganism guilds expressed by high PNR and PDR as well as corresponding gene abundances. This is agreement with previous studies, which reported that P could facilitate nitrifiers (Zheng et al, 2014) and denitrifiers (Graham et al, 2010). Phylogenetic analysis indicated AOA in the treatments with iron-rich soil could be clustered into one group with OUT1 as dominant OUT (Fig.…”

“…Noticeably, P could favor nitrifying and denitrifying guilds in many habitats. For instance, in the intertidal sediments of the Yangtze Estuary, TP had a significant correlation with both communities of AOA and AOB (Zheng et al, 2014). Further, in batch experiments with filtrate water from groundwater filters, the nitrification process could be effectively stimulated by adding phosphoric acid (de Vet et al, 2012).…”

Multiple Factors Affect Diversity and Abundance of Ammonia-Oxidizing Microorganisms in Iron Mine Soil

“…LT2FB (Mintie et al 2003), and N. multiformis (Norton et al 2002) and thus belonged to Nitrosospira cluster three. Several bands (1 through 6, 8 11, C9, and C12) were related with two Nitrosomonadales species from paddy soil and Yangtze Estuary sediments (Wu et al 2011;Zheng et al 2014) and were recognized as Nitrosomonadales-like sequences. Most of the AOB amoA OTUs belongs to cluster three (63 OTUs, 61 %), which the most dominant cluster.…”

The Abundance and Community Composition of Ammonia-Oxidizing Prokaryotes in Small-Reservoir Sediments in China’s Huashan Watershed

“…Other nutrient elements such as available phosphorus could affect the community composition of AOA [9,12]. Moreover, the concentration of organic carbon was found to significantly correlate with the community composition of AOA and AOB in the intertidal sediments of the Yangtze Estuary [15]. Moreover, the effects of nutrient levels on the abundance, diversity, and community compositions of AOA and AOB have been investigated.…”

“…Previous studies have investigated the distribution of AOA and AOB in lake sediments [9][10][11][12][13], the rhizosphere of freshwater macrophytes [14], estuary sediments [15], mangrove sediments [16], and marine sediments [1,17]. It has been found that AOA dominated in marine sediments [1,17], indicated by its better adaptation to anaerobic, low pH, and low ammonia habitats than AOB [18][19], whereas higher nutrients in the freshwater sediments promoted AOB dominance, such as river sediments [20], mangrove sediments [16,21], and shore side wetlands [22].…”