Abstract
Erythromycin (EM), a macrolide antibiotic, by influencing the biodiversity of microorganisms, might change the catabolic activity of the entire soil microbial community. Hence, the goal of this study was to determine the metabolic biodiversity in soil treated with EM (1 and 10 mg/kg soil) using the community-level physiological profiling (CLPP) method during a 90-day experiment. In addition, the effect of soil inoculation with antibiotic-resistant Raoultella sp. strain MC3 on CLPP was evaluated. The resistance and resilience concept as well as multifactorial analysis of data was exploited to interpret the outcomes obtained. EM negatively affected the metabolic microbial activity, as indicated by the values of the CLPP indices, i.e., microbial activity expressed as the average well-color development (AWCD), substrate richness (R), the Shannon–Wiener (H) and evenness (E) indices and the AWCD values for the six groups of carbon substrate present in EcoPlates until 15 days. The introduction of strain MC3 into soil increased the degradative activity of soil microorganisms in comparison with non-inoculated control. In contrast, at the consecutive sampling days, an increase in the values of the CLPP parameters was observed, especially for EM-10 + MC3-treated soil. Considering the average values of the resistance index for all of the measurement days, the resistance of the CLPP indices and the AWCD values for carbon substrate groups were categorized as follows: E > H > R > AWCD and polymers > amino acids > carbohydrates > miscellaneous > amines > carboxylic acids. The obtained results suggest a low level of resistance of soil microorganisms to EM and/or strain MC3 at the beginning of the exposure time, but the microbial community exhibited the ability to recover its initial decrease in catabolic activity over the experimental period. Despite the short-term effects, the balance of the soil ecosystem may be disturbed.
Highlights
Antibiotics, due to their common use all over the world, and continuous input and persistence in the environment, have been called emerging pollutants
community-level physiological profiling (CLPP) does not represent the catabolic potential of the entire microbial population and limits the analysis mainly to fast-growing bacteria, it has been successfully applied to prove the negative impact of antibiotics on the metabolic activity of soil microorganisms [31,32,33]
The results showed that the soil inoculation with EM and/or strain MC3 altered the catabolic activity of the examined microbial community
Summary
Antibiotics, due to their common use all over the world, and continuous input and persistence in the environment, have been called emerging pollutants. Nowadays, their concentration in soils ranges from a few ng to as much as 50 mg/kg of soil [1,2]. From the ecological point of view, it is important that antibiotics may adversely affect entire microbial communities, which may be illustrated by changes in their biodiversity [4,5] and metabolic activity [6,7,8]. (EM) has high consumption worldwide [9,10] The activity of this antibiotic involves blocking
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