Succession of bacterial community structure during the early stage of biofilm development in the Antarctic marine environment

Abstract

Compared to planktonic bacterial populations, biofilms have distinct bacterial community structures and play important ecological roles in various aquatic environments. Despite their ecological importance in nature, bacterial community structure and its succession during biofilm development in the Antarctic marine environment have not been elucidated. In this study, the succession of bacterial community, particularly during the early stage of biofilm development, in the Antarctic marine environment was investigated by pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Overall bacterial distribution in biofilms differed considerably from surrounding seawater. Relative abundance of Gammaproteobacteria and Bacteroidetes which accounted for 78.9-88.3% of bacterial community changed drastically during biofilm succession. Gammaproteobacteria became more abundant with proceeding succession (75.7% on day 4) and decreased to 46.1% on day 7. The relative abundance of Bacteroidetes showed opposite trend to Gammaproteobacteria, decreasing from the early days to the intermediate days and becoming more abundant in the later days. There were striking differences in the composition of major OTUs (≥ 1%) among samples during the early stages of biofilm formation. Gammaproteobacterial species increased until day 4, while members of Bacteroidetes, the most dominant group on day 1, decreased until day 4 and then increased again. Interestingly, Pseudoalteromonas prydzensis was predominant, accounting for up to 67.4% of the biofilm bacterial community and indicating its important roles in the biofilm development.

Microbial Biofilm Colonizing Plastic Substrates in the Ross Sea (Antarctica): First Overview of Community-Level Physiological Profiles

“…Plastics' surface represents a suitable substrate for microbial colonization, as documented by previous studies [2,7,11,43,44]. Within the wide scientific literature on plastisphere, however, functional diversity of microbial biofilms has been the subject of a few studies only [13,20,29,30], and even more limited is the understanding of microbial colonization currently available in polar environments [7,16,17,21,45,46]. This research is a first contribute to fill up current knowledge gaps on the functional diversity of microbial biofilm community harboured in two Ross Sea areas exposed to different environmental scenarios such as the presence of a glacier and of a source of human impact from the Zucchelli station.…”

“…Moreover, in Antarctica current datasets on plastic particles' distribution are limited to some regions only, making the available information on their chemical composition, sources and fate still fragmentary [4,8,9]. As a consequence, to date, research on plastisphere composition and metabolism in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic region are only just emerging [7][8][9][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

Soil Pollution from Micro- and Nanoplastic Debris: A Hidden and Unknown Biohazard

“…Indeed, the only papers dealing with these issues, concern the marine environment mainly utilizing a metagenomics approach. Nasser and Lynch [20] distinguished between hard and soft eco-corona by using the culture-dependent method followed by SDS-PAGE, whereas other studies determined microbial properties of plasti-sphere and biofilm, even at network analysis level [22], distinguishing the microbial community in the biofilm formation and maturation phase [201][202][203][204] and also determining the MPs-dependent and independent biofilm assemblage factors [205]. These data should be finally matched with that of metabolic activities, such as toxins, bacteriolytic substances, extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) and enzymes, to obtain a putative signature of biofilm formation steps.…”

Complete Genome Sequence of Marinobacter sp. Strain JH2, Isolated from Seawater of the Kiel Fjord

“…It was isolated from 200 μl seawater of the Kiel Fjord (Germany). Members of the genus Marinobacter are well distributed in aquatic environments all over the world (1–4). One feature of Marinobacter spp.…”