School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Mar Pollut Bull. 2022 Jun;179:113701. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.113701. Epub 2022 May 7.
Plastics, when entering the environment, are immediately colonised by microorganisms. This modifies their physico-chemical properties as well as their transport and fate in natural ecosystems, but whom pioneers this colonisation in marine ecosystems? Previous studies have focused on microbial communities that develop on plastics after relatively long incubation periods (i.e., days to months), but very little data is available regarding the earliest stages of colonisation on buoyant plastics in marine waters (i.e., minutes or hours). We conducted a preliminary study where the earliest hours of microbial colonisation on buoyant plastics in marine coastal waters were investigated by field incubations and amplicon sequencing of the prokaryotic and eukaryotic communities. Our results show that members of the Bacteroidetes group pioneer microbial attachment to plastics but, over time, their presence is masked by other groups - Gammaproteobacteria at first and later by Alphaproteobacteria. Interestingly, the eukaryotic community on plastics exposed to sunlight became dominated by phototrophic organisms from the phylum Ochrophyta, diatoms at the start and brown algae towards the end of the three-day incubations. This study defines the pioneering microbial community that colonises plastics immediately when entering coastal marine environments and that may set the seeding Plastisphere of plastics in the oceans.
塑料进入环境后，会立即被微生物定植。这会改变它们的物理化学性质，以及它们在自然生态系统中的迁移和归宿，但谁是海洋生态系统中定植的先驱者呢？先前的研究集中于在相对较长的孵育期（即数天到数月）后在塑料上发育的微生物群落，但关于在海洋水域中（即数分钟到数小时）浮塑料上最早定植阶段的数据非常有限。我们进行了一项初步研究，通过现场孵育和对原核生物和真核生物群落的扩增子测序，研究了海洋近岸水域浮塑料上微生物最早定植的最初几个小时。我们的结果表明，拟杆菌门的成员是微生物附着到塑料上的先驱者，但随着时间的推移，它们的存在被其他群体所掩盖——最初是γ变形菌门，然后是α变形菌门。有趣的是，暴露在阳光下的塑料上的真核生物群落开始由藻类门中的光合生物主导，先是硅藻，然后是在三天孵育结束时是褐藻。这项研究确定了在进入沿海海洋环境时立即定植塑料的先驱微生物群落，该群落可能是海洋中塑料“塑料生境”的种子。
