Abstract
BackgroundNon-carbonated natural mineral waters contain microorganisms that regularly grow after bottling despite low concentrations of dissolved organic matter (DOM). Yet, the compositions of bottled water microbiota and organic substrates that fuel microbial activity, and how both change after bottling, are still largely unknown.ResultsWe performed a multifaceted analysis of microbiota and DOM diversity in 12 natural mineral waters from six European countries. 16S rRNA gene-based analyses showed that less than 10 species-level operational taxonomic units (OTUs) dominated the bacterial communities in the water phase and associated with the bottle wall after a short phase of post-bottling growth. Members of the betaproteobacterial genera Curvibacter, Aquabacterium, and Polaromonas (Comamonadaceae) grew in most waters and represent ubiquitous, mesophilic, heterotrophic aerobes in bottled waters. Ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry of DOM in bottled waters and their corresponding source waters identified thousands of molecular formulae characteristic of mostly refractory, soil-derived DOM.ConclusionsThe bottle environment, including source water physicochemistry, selected for growth of a similar low-diversity microbiota across various bottled waters. Relative abundance changes of hundreds of multi-carbon molecules were related to growth of less than ten abundant OTUs. We thus speculate that individual bacteria cope with oligotrophic conditions by simultaneously consuming diverse DOM molecules.
Highlights
Non-carbonated natural mineral waters contain microorganisms that regularly grow after bottling despite low concentrations of dissolved organic matter (DOM)
The two waters were selected to represent the range of DOM concentrations that are typical for bottled waters at the time of bottling (Table 1, Additional file 1: Tables S1 to 4)
This indicated that only a small fraction of total DOM was immediately available for microbial growth, as has been shown for other types of oligotrophic drinking waters [9]
Summary
Non-carbonated natural mineral waters contain microorganisms that regularly grow after bottling despite low concentrations of dissolved organic matter (DOM). Lesaulnier et al Microbiome (2017) 5:126 temperature, with absolute cell counts reaching 105–106 cells/mL [1,2,3] Such microbial growth in non-carbonated bottled waters is a well-known fact, but the composition of the bottled water microbiota and its post-bottling dynamics have far been investigated by molecular techniques in only two natural mineral waters [2, 4]. These and numerous isolation-dependent studies [5,6,7,8] have established that Alpha-, Beta-, and Gammaproteobacteria are the prevalent microorganisms in bottled water. How different is the microbiota in bottled waters from different sources? How does the bottled water microbiota assemble? Are there differences between the free-living community in the water phase (plankton microbiota) and the inner-bottle-surface-associated community (biofilm microbiota)?
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