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

Abstract

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.

Insights on the particle-attached riverine archaeal community shifts linked to seasons and to multipollution during a Mediterranean extreme storm event

“…Archaea have been studied in only a few river environments (Herfort et al 2009;Hu et al 2016Hu et al , 2018Cannon et al 2017;Samson et al 2019;Lei et al 2020;Cao et al 2020;Pinto et al 2020;Shen et al 2021) and to the best of our knowledge, no study has characterized their diversity over different seasons in lotic ecosystems. Here, eDNA was extracted from riverine water samples from summer, autumn, and winter and characterized using high-throughput…”

“…Among the few papers in the literature that have linked archaeal diversity to environmental parameters, all addressed the effect of one family of parameters on changes in archaeal communities, such as nutrients (Herfort et al 2009;Hu et al 2016Hu et al , 2018Lei et al 2020;Cao et al 2020) or metals (Mahamoud Ahmed et al 2020;Shen et al 2021). This is, therefore, the first study on the Archaea domain where both diversity and a large panoply of physicochemical parameters (notably nutrients, trace metals, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides) have been analyzed for the same samples.…”

“…1b for further details). These parameters have been found to affect bacterial communities in freshwater ecosystems, and metals and nutrients also affect archaeal communities in freshwaters (Hu et al 2016;Lei et al 2020;Shen et al 2021). Nevertheless, to our knowledge, the effect of xenobiotics such as pesticides or pharmaceutical products on archaeal communities from freshwater ecosystems…”