In-depth characterization of bacterial and archaeal communities present in the abandoned Kettara pyrrhotite mine tailings (Morocco)

Abstract

In Morocco, pollution caused by closed mines continues to be a serious threat to the environment, like the generation of acid mine drainage. Mine drainage is produced by environmental and microbial oxidation of sulfur minerals originating from mine wastes. The fundamental role of microbial communities is well known, like implication of Fe-oxidizing and to a lesser extent S-oxidizing microorganism in bioleaching. However, the structure of the microbial communities varies a lot from one site to another, like diversity depends on many factors such as mineralogy, concentration of metals and metalloids or pH, etc. In this study, prokaryotic communities in the pyrrhotite-rich tailings of Kettara mine were characterized using the Illumina sequencing. In-depth phylogenetic analysis revealed a total of 12 phyla of bacteria and 1 phyla of Archaea. The majority of sequences belonged to the phylum of Proteobacteria and Firmicutes with a predominance of Bacillus, Pseudomonas or Corynebacterium genera. Many microbial populations are implicated in the iron, sulfur and arsenic cycles, like Acidiferrobacter, Leptospirillum, or Alicyclobacillus in Fe; Acidiferrobacter and Sulfobacillus in S; and Bacillus or Pseudomonas in As. This is one of the first description of prokaryotic communities in pyrrhotite-rich mine tailings using high-throughput sequencing.

Culture‐dependent hunt and characterization of iron‐oxidizing bacteria in Baiyin Copper Mine, China, and their application in metals extraction

“…However, our findings revealed that Leptospirillum ‐like bacteria can become predominant among the bacterial population within mining environments, as reported by Bond et al . Recently, Bruneel et al reported enough diversity of Leptospirillum in Kettara pyrrhotite mine tailings (Morocco). The diversity investigation of Zijinshan commercial non‐aeration low‐grade copper extraction heap operated at 0.8 pH revealed that the 28.29% of retrieved 16S rRNA sequences were related with Leptospirillum genus even in the same site the highest 9% of the retrieved sequences were related with Leptospirillum genus .…”

Characterization of an acid rock drainage microbiome and transcriptome at the Ely Copper Mine Superfund site

“…Pseudomonas (2.6-3.3%), Bradyrhizobium (1.7-4.1%), and Streptomyces (2.9-5.0%) were the most abundantly annotated microbial genera in all samples (Fig 3). Although not consistent with our hypothesis, acid-tolerant bacteria from these genera have been isolated from other mines [17,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64], producing nutrients and mediating the flux of metal ions [65,66]. Species of Leptospirillum, Acidithiobacillus, Acidiphilium, and Thiobacillus were also present in the metagenome but at significantly lower abundance (<0.7%).…”

Streptomyces Dominate the Soil Under Betula Trees That Have Naturally Colonized a Red Gypsum Landfill

“…There is abundant literature on the characterization of microbial communities from forest or agricultural soils contaminated by PTE or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) ( Tardy et al, 2015 ; Yergeau et al, 2015 ; Foulon et al, 2016a , b ). Microorganisms occurring in mine tailings have also drew significant interest in the past decade, especially in acid mine drainage dumps ( Méndez-García et al, 2015 ; Bruneel et al, 2017 ; Gupta et al, 2017 ; Mesa et al, 2017 ). However, in other environments with different soil characteristics (bauxite and red gypsum), there are considerably fewer studies.…”