Response of soil bacterial communities to lead and zinc pollution revealed by Illumina MiSeq sequencing investigation

Abstract

Soil provides a critical environment for microbial community development. However, microorganisms may be sensitive to substances such as heavy metals (HMs), which are common soil contaminants. This study investigated bacterial communities using 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene fragment sequencing in geographic regions with and without HM pollution to elucidate the effects of soil properties and HMs on bacterial communities. No obvious changes in the richness or diversity of bacterial communities were observed between samples from mining and control areas. Significant differences in bacterial richness and diversity were detected between samples from different geographic regions, indicating that the basic soil characteristics were the most important factors affecting bacterial communities other than HMs. However, the abundances of several phyla and genera differed significantly between mining and control samples, suggesting that Zn and Pb pollution may impact the soil bacterial community composition. Moreover, regression analyses showed that the relative abundances of these phyla and genera were correlated significantly with the soil-available Zn and Pb contents. Redundancy analysis indicated that the soil K, ammoniacal nitrogen (NH-N), total Cu, and available Zn and Cu contents were the most important factors. Our results not only suggested that the soil bacteria were sensitive to HM stresses but also indicated that other soil properties may affect soil microorganisms to a greater extent.

Microbial community response to environmental changes in a technosol historically contaminated by the burning of chemical ammunitions

“…The proportion of Chloroflexi reached 10 to 20% of the communities, in the same range as in the Zn and Pbcontaminated soil studied by Xu et al (2017). Chloroflexi are usually main bacterial phyla in soils, but in lower proportion (less than 1%) on non-polluted sites (Zhalnina et al, 2015).…”

“…Chloroflexi are usually main bacterial phyla in soils, but in lower proportion (less than 1%) on non-polluted sites (Zhalnina et al, 2015). The Verrucomicrobia phylum, representing only a few percent of the "Place-à-gaz" soil community, includes organisms that are tolerant to Zn and Pb (Xu et al, 2017).…”

“…Both Leptospirillum and Acidiferrobacter genera share with Bradyrhizobium, the other dominant genus, the potential ability to fix N2 and thus contribute to the N cycle in the mesocosm (Thouin et al, 2017). Some Bradyrhizobium strains also carry the aioA gene (Sultana et al, 2012), while being potentially tolerant to Zn and Pb (Xu et al, 2017).…”

“…However, the structure of the microbial community on this particular site has not yet been determined. Several studies have shown the impact of inorganic or oganic 4 pollution on the structure of communities and on microbial diversity (Golebiewski et al, 2014;Kuppusamy et al, 2016;Xu et al, 2017). Bourceret et al (2016) studied the effect of combined pollution on microbial structure during revegetation of an industrial wasteland.…”

Volatile flavour components, microbiota and their correlations in different sufu, a Chinese fermented soybean food

“…DNA extraction, PCR amplification and sequencing experiments were based on the works of Xu et al . () with minor modifications. Briefly, microbial DNA was extracted from sufu samples using the E.Z.N.A.…”