Abstract
To compare microbial functional diversity in different oil-contaminated fields and to know the effects of oil contaminant and environmental factors, soil samples were taken from typical oil-contaminated fields located in five geographic regions of China. GeoChip, a high-throughput functional gene array, was used to evaluate the microbial functional genes involved in contaminant degradation and in other major biogeochemical/metabolic processes. Our results indicated that the overall microbial community structures were distinct in each oil-contaminated field, and samples were clustered by geographic locations. The organic contaminant degradation genes were most abundant in all samples and presented a similar pattern under oil contaminant stress among the five fields. In addition, alkane and aromatic hydrocarbon degradation genes such as monooxygenase and dioxygenase were detected in high abundance in the oil-contaminated fields. Canonical correspondence analysis indicated that the microbial functional patterns were highly correlated to the local environmental variables, such as oil contaminant concentration, nitrogen and phosphorus contents, salt and pH. Finally, a total of 59% of microbial community variation from GeoChip data can be explained by oil contamination, geographic location and soil geochemical parameters. This study provided insights into the in situ microbial functional structures in oil-contaminated fields and discerned the linkages between microbial communities and environmental variables, which is important to the application of bioremediation in oil-contaminated sites.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Scientific Foundation of China (No. 40730738), the United States Department of Energy under the Environmental Remediation Science Program, and was part of the Virtual Institute for Microbial Stress and Survival (http://VIMSS.lbl.gov), which was supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Genomics Program: GTL through contract DE-AC02-05CH11231 between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U. S. Department of Energy, and was also supported by the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology under the Oklahoma Applied Research Support Program.
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Liang, Y., Van Nostrand, J., Deng, Y. et al. Functional gene diversity of soil microbial communities from five oil-contaminated fields in China. ISME J 5, 403–413 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2010.142
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2010.142
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