Response of bacterial communities to short-term pyrene exposure in red soil

Abstract

Pyrene, a representative polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compound produced mainly from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, is hazardous to ecosystem health. However, long-term exposure studies did not detect any significant effects of pyrene on soil microorganism. In this study, short-term microcosm experiments were conducted to identify the immediate effect of pyrene on soil bacterial communities. A freshly-collected pristine red soil was spiked with pyrene at 0, 10, 100, 200, and 500 mg·kg^-1 and incubated for one day and seven days. The bacterial communities in the incubated soils were analyzed using 16S rRNA sequencing and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) methods. The results revealed high bacterial diversity in both unspiked and pyrene-spiked soils. Only at the highest pyrene-spiking rate of 500 mg·kg^-1, two minor bacteria groups of the identified 14 most abundant bacteria groups were completely suppressed. Short-term exposure to pyrene resulted in dominance of Proteobacteria in soil, followed by Acidobacteria, Firmutes, and Bacteroidetes. Our findings showed that bacterial community structure did respond to the presence of pyrene but recovered rapidly from the perturbation. The intensity of impact and the rate of recovery showed some pyrene dosage-dependent trends. Our results revealed that different levels of pyrene may affect the bacterial community structure by suppressing or selecting certain groups of bacteria. It was also found that the bacterial community was most susceptible to pyrene within one day of the chemical addition.

Keywords

pyrene / bacterial communities / terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism / short-term exposure / rank-abundance plots

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Christopher van der Gast for discussion and critical review of this manuscript and Professor Yongguan Zhu and Dr. Peter Christie for their constructive comments on the development of the manuscript. This research was financially supported by the National High-Tech R&D Program of China (863 Program) (Grant No. 2012AA06A204) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41271324 and 40801118). Hong Li is supported by the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams (KZCX2-Yw-T08).

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