Abstract
Microbes have great potential for arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb) bioremediation in heavily contaminated soil because they have the ability to biotransform As and Sb to species that have less toxicity or are more easily removed. In this study, we integrated a metagenomic method with physicochemical characterization to elucidate the composition of microbial community and functional genes (related to As and Sb) in a high As (range from 34.11 to 821.23 mg kg−1) and Sb (range from 226.67 to 3923.07 mg kg−1) contaminated mine field. Metagenomic analysis revealed that microbes from 18 phyla were present in the 5 samples of soil contaminated with high As and Sb. Moreover, redundancy analysis (RDA) of the relationship between the 18 phyla and the concentration of As and Sb demonstrated that 5 phyla of microbes, i.e. Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Nitrospirae, Tenericutes and Gemmatimonadetes were positively correlated with As and Sb concentration. The distribution, diversity and abundance of functional genes (including arsC, arrA, aioA, arsB and ACR3) were much higher for the samples containing higher As and Sb concentrations. Based on correlation analysis, the results showed a positive relationship between arsC-like (R2 = 0.871) and aioA-like (R2 = 0.675) gene abundance and As concentration, and indicated that intracellular As(V) reduction and As(III) oxidation could be the dominant As detoxification mechanism enabling the microbes to survive in the environment. This study provides a direct and reliable reference on the diversity of microbial community and functional genes in an extremely high concentration As- and Sb-contaminated environment.
Highlights
Arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb) are naturally occurring toxic elements, which are released into the natural environment either by natural activities or anthropogenic sources from various industries [1]
As for DGGE/ TGGE, it can only analyze DNA fragments that are below 500 base pairs
The Distribution of Inorganic Components in the Soil The main physicochemical characteristics of the soil samples are shown in Table 1, which included the pH values, the contents of main elements C, N and H and the concentrations of Sb, As, and other heavy metals
Summary
Arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb) are naturally occurring toxic elements, which are released into the natural environment either by natural activities or anthropogenic sources from various industries [1]. Both As and Sb can be strongly retained in soils [2], and their toxicity, behavior and bioavailability in the environment intensively rely on speciation and environmental conditions. 99% of microorganisms in the natural environment have not been cultured Traditional fingerprint methods, such as T-RFLP [10], DGGE and TGGE [11], can identify designated DNA fragments and analyze the composition of a microbial community efficiently, whereas these techniques still have some limitations and deficiencies. Assessment of the composition of the whole community gene pool of microbial communities is limited using these methods
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