Metagenomic approach reveals variation of microbes with arsenic and antimony metabolism genes from highly contaminated soil

PLoS One. 2014 Oct 9;9(10):e108185. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108185. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Microbes have great potential for arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb) bioremediation in heavily contaminated soil because they have the ability to biotransform As and Sb to species that have less toxicity or are more easily removed. In this study, we integrated a metagenomic method with physicochemical characterization to elucidate the composition of microbial community and functional genes (related to As and Sb) in a high As (range from 34.11 to 821.23 mg kg-1) and Sb (range from 226.67 to 3923.07 mg kg-1) contaminated mine field. Metagenomic analysis revealed that microbes from 18 phyla were present in the 5 samples of soil contaminated with high As and Sb. Moreover, redundancy analysis (RDA) of the relationship between the 18 phyla and the concentration of As and Sb demonstrated that 5 phyla of microbes, i.e. Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Nitrospirae, Tenericutes and Gemmatimonadetes were positively correlated with As and Sb concentration. The distribution, diversity and abundance of functional genes (including arsC, arrA, aioA, arsB and ACR3) were much higher for the samples containing higher As and Sb concentrations. Based on correlation analysis, the results showed a positive relationship between arsC-like (R2 = 0.871) and aioA-like (R2 = 0.675) gene abundance and As concentration, and indicated that intracellular As(V) reduction and As(III) oxidation could be the dominant As detoxification mechanism enabling the microbes to survive in the environment. This study provides a direct and reliable reference on the diversity of microbial community and functional genes in an extremely high concentration As- and Sb-contaminated environment.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Antimony / metabolism*
  • Arsenic / metabolism*
  • Bacteria / metabolism*
  • Biodegradation, Environmental
  • Biotransformation / physiology
  • Environment
  • Environmental Pollution
  • Metagenomics / methods
  • Oxidation-Reduction
  • Soil
  • Soil Microbiology
  • Soil Pollutants / metabolism*

Substances

  • Soil
  • Soil Pollutants
  • Antimony
  • Arsenic

Grants and funding

This work is financially supported by the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51290282) and National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2012AA062604). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.