Microbial source tracking identifies sources of contamination for a river flowing into the Yellow Sea

Abstract

The excessive input of nutrients into rivers can lead to contamination and eutrophication, which poses a threat to the health of aquatic ecosystems. It is crucial to identify the sources of contaminants to develop effective management plans for eutrophication. However, traditional methods for identifying pollution sources have been insufficient, making it difficult to manage river health effectively. High-throughput sequencing offers a novel method for microbial community source tracking, which can help identify dominant pollution sources in rivers. The Wanggang River was selected for study, as it has suffered accelerated eutrophication due to considerable nutrient input from riparian pollutants. The present study identified the dominant microbial communities in the Wanggang River basin, including Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, and Firmicutes. The Source Tracker machine-learning classification system was used to create source-specific microbial community fingerprints to determine the primary sources of contaminants in the basin, with agricultural fertilizer being identified as the main pollutant source. By identifying the microbial communities of potential pollution sources, the study determined the contributing pollutant sources in several major sections of the Wanggang River, including industry, urban land, pond culture, and livestock land. These findings can be used to improve the identification of pollution sources in specific environments and develop effective pollution management plans for polluted river water.

The source of microbial transmission influences niche colonization and microbiome development

“…The BMST infers the proportion and probability of a source microbiome to be present in a sink microbiome, providing a tool to find traces of the source microbiome in the sink microbiome [64][65][66]. We aimed to investigate the proportion of microbes, identified in the juvenile microbiome (surface sterilized juveniles and non-surface sterilized juveniles; sink), shared with the microbiome isolated from the parental organs ( paternal: placenta and testes versus maternal: surface sterilized unfertilized eggs and non-surface sterilized unfertilized eggs), with the environmental microbiome (water) and assess potential contamination through the sampling process (control: PBS / PVP-I) (all source populations).…”