Abstract
Application of chemical dispersants to oil spills in the marine environment is a common practice to disperse oil into the water column and stimulate oil biodegradation by increasing its bioavailability to indigenous bacteria capable of naturally metabolizing hydrocarbons. In the context of a spill event, the biodegradation of crude oil and gas condensate off eastern Canada is an essential component of a response strategy. In laboratory experiments, we simulated conditions similar to an oil spill with and without the addition of chemical dispersant under both winter and summer conditions and evaluated the natural attenuation potential for hydrocarbons in near-surface sea water from the vicinity of crude oil and natural gas production facilities off eastern Canada. Chemical analyses were performed to determine hydrocarbon degradation rates, and metagenome binning combined with metatranscriptomics was used to reconstruct abundant bacterial genomes and estimate their oil degradation gene abundance and activity. Our results show important and rapid structural shifts in microbial populations in all three different oil production sites examined following exposure to oil, oil with dispersant and dispersant alone. We found that the addition of dispersant to crude oil enhanced oil degradation rates and favored the abundance and expression of oil-degrading genes from a Thalassolituus sp. (that is, metagenome bin) that harbors multiple alkane hydroxylase (alkB) gene copies. We propose that this member of the Oceanospirillales group would be an important oil degrader when oil spills are treated with dispersant.
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Acknowledgements
The NRC and COOGER thank Drs Simon Courtenay (DFO; project management), William Li (DFO; bacteria enumeration), Youyu Lu (DFO; project management), Haibo Niu (Dalhousie University; modeling work), and Yongsheng Wu (DFO; modeling work), Ms Carol Anstey (DFO; nutrients) and Mr Rod Doane (DFO; administrative support and editing) for their contributions to this study. In addition we acknowledge the excellent technical support of Brian Robinson, Gary Wolfgeschaffen, Scott Ryan, Peter Thamer, Jennifer Mason and Sylvie Sanschagrin. We acknowledge Robert Dunphy (Hibernia Management Corporation), Trudy Wells (Suncor) and Megan Tuttle (ExxonMobil) for the representative samples of crude oil and gas condensate. We thank Antoine Pagé for manuscript revision. This study was funded by the Environmental Studies Research Funds (Natural Resources Canada). We also wish to acknowledge Compute Canada for access to the McGill University High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure (Guillimin system).
Author contributions
JT wrote software, analyzed data and wrote manuscript. CWG and EY planned experimental design, analyzed data and edited manuscript. NF carried out the microcosms experiments. SC performed chemical analyses of microcosms. ME performed DNA extraction and prepared sequencing libraries. TLK and KL participated in the design of the study.
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Tremblay, J., Yergeau, E., Fortin, N. et al. Chemical dispersants enhance the activity of oil- and gas condensate-degrading marine bacteria. ISME J 11, 2793–2808 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.129
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.129
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