Distinct microbial metabolic activities of biofilms colonizing microplastics in three freshwater ecosystems

Miao, Lingzhan; Yu, Yue; Adyel, Tanveer M.; Wang, Chengqian; Liu, Zhilin; Liu, Songqi; Huang, Liuyan; You, Guoxiang; Meng, Meng; Qu, Hao; Hou, Jun

doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2020.123577

Cited by 119 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The rarefaction curve for ACE, Chao1 and observed OTUs was also calculated to evaluate the sequencing quantity sufficiency. Microbial beta diversity analysis: a principal component analysis (PCA) based on the Bray-Curtis distance was conducted and visualized with R package vegan; nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) was also calculated in supplementary with PCA using R package vegan and Qiime [31]. A permutational multivariate analysis of variance test (PERMANOVA, n = 999) was applied to examine the interpretation level and statistical significance among differences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The influences of environmental factors on the archaeal community were evaluated with a redundancy analysis (RDA) or canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) after the variance inflation test (VIF) to select prominent factors (VIF value < 10) with R package vegan [1]. A variance partitioning analysis (VPA) was used to identify and compare the impact of two factor groups (physicochemical factors and heavy metals) on the archaeal community with R package vegan [31]. Excel 2016 and Origin 2019 were used for data analysis and diagram drawing, and the results were expressed as mean value ± standard deviation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying Microbial Distribution Drivers of Archaeal Community in Sediments from a Black-Odorous Urban River—A Case Study of the Zhang River Basin

Shen

Zhao

Xie

et al. 2021

Water

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Rapid urbanization has destroyed urban water systems and led to blackened and odorous rivers. The heavily polluted rivers are always facing eutrophication and heavy metal pollution, while the combined effects of these environmental factors on the microbial diversity and distribution of the river microbial communities have not been adequately reported, especially the archaeal communities. In this study, we investigated the community structure and microbial distribution of sediment archaeal communities from an urban blackened and odorous river basin of the Zhang river, in Nanling, China. Results showed that the archaeal community from the eight sediment sites have average values of Shannon and Chao1 at 3.4921 and 232.7202, respectively. The community diversity and richness were different among samples. Halobacterota and Euryarchaeota were the most abundant phylum and Crenarchaeota also took up a considerable amount of the archaeal community. To reveal the main environmental drivers of the distribution of archaeal communities in sediment, the environmental physicochemical factors (total nitrogen, total phosphorus, oxidation/reduction potential, nitrate nitrogen, ammonia nitrogen, pH and total organic carbon) and heavy metals (Cr, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Cd, Pb and Hg) in sediment were determined. A redundancy analysis (RDA) revealed that Eh was the most prominent influencing factor, and As was the most influential heavy metal on the microbial distribution of archaeal communities. Furthermore, a variance partitioning analysis (VPA) was used to identify the impacts of physicochemical factors and heavy metals on the archaeal community distribution. Results showed that heavy metals have higher effects on archaeal community distribution than physicochemical factors. The present study suggested that the heavy metal pollution should be paid more attention in the microbial distribution in heavily polluted urban rivers, and also should be taken into consideration for improving the efficacies of ecological evaluation and remediation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying Microbial Distribution Drivers of Archaeal Community in Sediments from a Black-Odorous Urban River—A Case Study of the Zhang River Basin

Shen

Zhao

Xie

et al. 2021

Water

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“…Gasim et al (2015,2016) [41,42] evaluate the efficiency of plastic materials for water treatment. The similar method was also applied to explore the differences of microbial communities of biofilms on plastic substrates and natural substrates [28][29][30]. PE and LDPE have been applied to research on biofilm colonizing in previous studies [28,30], while PMMA and PET were used in this study to serve as new substrates for biofilm.…”

Section: Biofilm Community Diversity On Microplasticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Besides, plastic biofilms can gather pathogen bacteria selectively [14,28], which increased the residence of pathogens in aquatic ecosystem. Since plastic debris can serve as a substance for biofilm to colonize, the control substrates, such as rock or glass, were recently recommended to use when studying the potential impacts of the plastic-biofilm in aquatic environment [29,30]. Miao et al [8] investigated the bacterial diversity of biofilms on microplastic substrates (polyethylene, PE and polypropylene, PP) and natural substrates (cobblestone and wood) and the alpha diversity was found to be lower in the microplastic-associated communities than those on the natural substrates.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kettner et al [31] explored the diversity and community composition of fungi attached to polyethylene (PE) and polystyrene (PS) particles incubated in different aquatic systems and the MP-associated communities were reported to be distinct from fungal communities in the surrounding water and on the natural substrate wood. Very recent studies found that biofilms on the plastic surface had a lower carbon metabolism rate compared with biofilms on the natural surface, such as rock [30,32]. In terms of types of plastics, previous studies focused mainly on the most detectable plastic types, including polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP) and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) plastics in freshwater system [21,22,33], however, other plastics are also detected in aquatic environment, and their effects of the colonized biofilm are largely unknown.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of Plastic Debris on the Biofilm Bacterial Communities in Lake Water

Shen

Huang

Xie

et al. 2021

Water

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Increasing discharge of plastic debris into aquatic ecosystems and the worsening ecological risks have received growing attention. Once released, plastic debris could serve as a new substrate for microbes in waters. The complex relationship between plastics and biofilms has aroused great interest. To confirm the hypothesis that the presence of plastic in water affects the composition of biofilm in natural state, in situ biofilm culture experiments were conducted in a lake for 40 days. The diversity of biofilm attached on natural (cobble stones (CS) and wood) and plastic substrates (Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)) were compared, and the community structure and composition were also analyzed. Results from high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA showed that the diversity and species richness of biofilm bacterial communities on natural substrate (observed species of 1353~1945, Simpson index of 0.977~0.989 and Shannon–Wiener diversity index of 7.42~8.60) were much higher than those on plastic substrates (observed species of 900~1146, Simpson index of 0.914~0.975 and Shannon–Wiener diversity index of 5.47~6.99). The NMDS analyses were used to confirm the taxonomic significance between different samples, and Anosim (p = 0.001, R = 0.892) and Adonis (p = 0.001, R = 808, F = 11.19) demonstrated that this classification was statistically rigorous. Different dominant bacterial communities were found on plastic and natural substrates. Alphaproteobacterial, Betaproteobacteria and Synechococcophycideae dominated on the plastic substrate, while Gammaproteobacteria, Phycisphaerae and Planctomycetia played the main role on the natural substrates. The bacterial community structure of the two substrates also showed significant difference which is consistent with previous studies using other polymer types. Our results shed light on the fact that plastic debris can serve as a new habitat for biofilm colonization, unlike natural substrates, pathogens and plastic-degrading microorganisms selectively attached to plastic substrates, which affected the bacterial community structure and composition in aquatic environment. This study provided a new insight into understanding the potential impacts of plastics serving as a new habitat for microbial communities in freshwater environments. Future research should focus on the potential impacts of plastic-attached biofilms in various aquatic environments and the whole life cycle of plastics (i.e., from plastic fragments to microplastics) and also microbial flock characteristics using microbial plastics in the natural environment should also be addressed.

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