CAS Key Laboratory of Urban Pollutant Conversion, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; Department of Environmental Engineering, Universitas Pertamina, Jakarta 12220, Indonesia.
Section of Biological Oceanography, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, Warnemünde D-18119, Germany; Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
Sci Total Environ. 2020 Jun 15;721:137767. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.137767. Epub 2020 Mar 6.
Micropollutants have become of great concern, because of their disrupting effects on the structure and function of microbial communities. However, little is known about the relative importance of trace micropollutants on the aquatic prokaryotic communities as compared to the traditional physico-chemical characteristics, especially at different spatial dimensions. Here, we investigated free-living (FL) and particle-associated (PA) prokaryotic communities in a subtropical water reservoir, China, across seasons at horizontal (surface water) and vertical (depth-profile) scales by using 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Our results showed that the shared variances of physico-chemicals and micropollutants explained majority of the spatial variations in prokaryotic communities, suggesting a strong joint effect of the two abiotic categories on reservoir prokaryotic communities. Micropollutants appeared to exert strong independent influence on the core sub-communities (i.e., abundant and wide-spread taxa) than on the satellite (i.e., less abundant and narrow-range taxa) counterparts. The pure effect of micropollutants on both core and satellite sub-communities from FL and PA fractions was ~1.5 folds greater than that of physico-chemical factors at the horizontal scale, whereas an opposite effect was observed at the vertical scale. Moreover, eight micropollutants including anti-fungal agents, antibiotics, bisphenol analogues, stimulant and UV-filter were identified as the major disrupting compounds with strong associations with core taxa of typical freshwater prokaryotes. Altogether, we concluded that the ecological disrupting effects of micropollutants on prokaryotic communities may vary along horizontal and vertical dimensions in freshwater ecosystems.
微污染物因其对微生物群落结构和功能的破坏作用而受到极大关注。然而，与传统理化特性相比，人们对痕量微污染物对水生原核生物群落的相对重要性知之甚少，尤其是在不同的空间尺度上。在这里，我们通过使用 16S rRNA 基因扩增子测序技术，在中国亚热带水库的水平（地表水）和垂直（深度剖面）尺度上，在季节间研究了自由生活（FL）和颗粒相关（PA）原核生物群落。我们的结果表明，理化特性和微污染物的共享方差解释了原核生物群落的大部分空间变化，这表明这两个非生物类别对水库原核生物群落具有很强的联合作用。微污染物似乎对核心亚群落（即丰富且广泛分布的分类群）施加了强烈的独立影响，而不是对卫星亚群落（即不太丰富且范围狭窄的分类群）施加了强烈的独立影响。在水平尺度上，微污染物对 FL 和 PA 分数的核心和卫星亚群落的纯效应是理化因子的 1.5 倍左右，而在垂直尺度上则观察到相反的效应。此外，包括抗真菌剂、抗生素、双酚类似物、兴奋剂和紫外线滤光剂在内的八种微污染物被确定为与典型淡水原核生物核心分类群具有强烈关联的主要破坏化合物。总的来说，我们得出结论，微污染物对原核生物群落的生态破坏作用可能沿淡水生态系统的水平和垂直维度而变化。
