Microbial Communities of Seawater and Coastal Soil of Russian Arctic Region and Their Potential for Bioremediation from Hydrocarbon Pollutants

Abstract

The development of Arctic regions leads to pollution of marine and coastal environments with oil and petroleum products. The purpose of this work was to determine the diversity of microbial communities in seawater, as well as in littoral and coastal soil, and the potential ability of their members to degrade hydrocarbons degradation and to isolate oil-degrading bacteria. Using high-throughput sequencing of the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene, the dominance of bacteria in polar communities was shown, the proportion of archaea did not exceed 2% (of the total number of sequences in the libraries). Archaea inhabiting the seawater belonged to the genera Nitrosopumilus and Nitrosoarchaeum and to the Nitrososphaeraceae family. In the polluted samples, members of the Gammaproteobacteria, Alphaproteobacteria, and Actinomycetes classes predominated; bacteria of the classes Bacteroidia, Clostridia, Acidimicrobiia, Planctomycetia, and Deltaproteobacteria were less represented. Using the iVikodak program and KEGG database, the potential functional characteristics of the studied prokaryotic communities were predicted. Bacteria were potentially involved in nitrogen and sulfur cycles, in degradation of benzoate, terephthalate, fatty acids, and alkanes. A total of 19 strains of bacteria of the genera Pseudomonas, Aeromonas, Oceanisphaera, Shewanella, Paeniglutamicibacter, and Rhodococcus were isolated from the studied samples. Among them were psychrotolerant and psychrophilic bacteria growing in seawater and utilizing crude oil, diesel fuel, and motor oils. The data obtained suggest that the studied microbial communities could participate in the removal of hydrocarbons from arctic seawater and coastal soils and suggested the possibility of the application of the isolates for the bioaugmentation of oil-contaminated polar environments.

Identification of rare microbial colonizers of plastic materials incubated in a coral reef environment

“…A few highly abundant hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria were found on all three polymer types throughout the incubation: Alteromonas , Marinomonas , Oleibacter and Hyphomonas ( Albertsson et al, 1987 ; Yakimov et al, 2007 ; Dohnalkova et al, 2011 ; Hirai et al, 2011 ; Lorite et al, 2011 ; Hahladakis et al, 2018 ; Kirstein et al, 2019 ; Yakimov et al, 2019 ; Semenova et al, 2022 ; Yakimov et al, 2022 ). These taxa are known to possess alkane-1-monooxygenase genes, an enzyme required for hydrocarbon/n-alkane degradation ( Semenova et al, 2022 ). The order Oceanospirillales includes a wide array of hydrocarbon utilizers (predominantly polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) degradation), most notably Oceanospirillaceae ( Oleibacter spp.…”

Bacteria degrading both n-alkanes and aromatic hydrocarbons are prevalent in soils

“…In contrast to these taxa, there are no papers indicating multi-degrading capabilities of the Paeniglutamicibacter genus, including also previous studies (namely, before reclassification of the Arthrobacter genus; Busse 2016 ). On the other hand, the Paeniglutamicibacter representatives were isolated from a phenanthrene-degrading consortium (Sakdapetsiri et al 2021 ) and an oil-affected environment (Margesin et al 2013 ; Semenova et al 2022 ). Although hydrocarbon-degrading genes belonging to the mentioned taxon were not identified in the analyzed metagenomes, we are aware that they might be outside the applied gene detection set (i.e., cyp153 ).…”

Genome Analysis and Potential Ecological Functions of Members of the Genus Ensifer from Subsurface Environments and Description of Ensifer oleiphilus sp. nov.

“…The profiles of light aliphatic hydrocarbons were determined using a Crystal 5000.1 gas chromatograph (Chromatec, Yoshkar-Ola, Mari El, Russia) with a ZB-FFAP 15 m capillary column and a flame ionization detector. Evaluation of oil biodegradation by the studied strains and its internal normalization based on the n -alkanes to iso -alkanes ratio were performed as described earlier [ 61 ].…”