scholarly journals Highly Distinct Microbial Communities in Elevated Strings and Submerged Flarks in the Boreal Aapa-Type Mire

2022 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Andrey L. Rakitin ◽  
Shahjahon Begmatov ◽  
Alexey V. Beletsky ◽  
Dmitriy A. Philippov ◽  
Vitaly V. Kadnikov ◽  
...  

Large areas in the northern hemisphere are covered by extensive wetlands, which represent a complex mosaic of raised bogs, eutrophic fens, and aapa mires all in proximity to each other. Aapa mires differ from other types of wetlands by their concave surface, heavily watered by the central part, as well as by the presence of large-patterned string-flark complexes. In this paper, we characterized microbial diversity patterns in the surface peat layers of the neighboring string and flark structures located within the mire site in the Vologda region of European North Russia, using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The microbial communities in raised strings were clearly distinct from those in submerged flarks. Strings were dominated by the Alpha- and Gammaproteobacteria. Other abundant groups were the Acidobacteriota, Bacteroidota, Verrucomicrobiota, Actinobacteriota, and Planctomycetota. Archaea accounted for only 0.4% of 16S rRNA gene sequences retrieved from strings. By contrast, they comprised about 22% of all sequences in submerged flarks and mostly belonged to methanogenic lineages. Methanotrophs were nearly absent. Other flark-specific microorganisms included the phyla Chloroflexi, Spirochaetota, Desulfobacterota, Beijerinckiaceae- and Rhodomicrobiaceae-affiliated Alphaproteobacteria, and uncultivated groups env.OPS_17 and vadinHA17 of the Bacteroidota. Such pattern probably reflects local anaerobic conditions in the submerged peat layers in flarks.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Crampon ◽  
Coralie Soulier ◽  
Pauline Sidoli ◽  
Jennifer Hellal ◽  
Catherine Joulian ◽  
...  

The demand for energy and chemicals is constantly growing, leading to an increase of the amounts of contaminants discharged to the environment. Among these, pharmaceutical molecules are frequently found in treated wastewater that is discharged into superficial waters. Indeed, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are designed to remove organic pollution from urban effluents but are not specific, especially toward contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), which finally reach the natural environment. In this context, it is important to study the fate of micropollutants, especially in a soil aquifer treatment (SAT) context for water from WWTPs, and for the most persistent molecules such as benzodiazepines. In the present study, soils sampled in a reed bed frequently flooded by water from a WWTP were spiked with diazepam and oxazepam in microcosms, and their concentrations were monitored for 97 days. It appeared that the two molecules were completely degraded after 15 days of incubation. Samples were collected during the experiment in order to follow the dynamics of the microbial communities, based on 16S rRNA gene sequencing for Archaea and Bacteria, and ITS2 gene for Fungi. The evolution of diversity and of specific operating taxonomic units (OTUs) highlighted an impact of the addition of benzodiazepines, a rapid resilience of the fungal community and an evolution of the bacterial community. It appeared that OTUs from the Brevibacillus genus were more abundant at the beginning of the biodegradation process, for diazepam and oxazepam conditions. Additionally, Tax4Fun tool was applied to 16S rRNA gene sequencing data to infer on the evolution of specific metabolic functions during biodegradation. It finally appeared that the microbial community in soils frequently exposed to water from WWTP, potentially containing CECs such as diazepam and oxazepam, may be adapted to the degradation of persistent contaminants.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ehsaneddin Asgari ◽  
Kiavash Garakani ◽  
Alice Carolyn McHardy ◽  
Mohammad R.K. Mofrad

Motivation: Microbial communities play important roles in the function and maintenance of various biosystems, ranging from the human body to the environment. A major challenge in microbiome research is the classification of microbial communities of different environments or host phenotypes. The most common and cost-effective approach for such studies to date is 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Recent falls in sequencing costs have increased the demand for simple, efficient, and accurate methods for rapid detection or diagnosis with proved applications in medicine, agriculture, and forensic science. We describe a reference- and alignment-free approach for predicting environments and host phenotypes from 16S rRNA gene sequencing based on k-mer representations that benefits from a bootstrapping framework for investigating the sufficiency of shallow sub-samples. Deep learning methods as well as classical approaches were explored for predicting environments and host phenotypes. Results: k-mer distribution of shallow sub-samples outperformed the computationally costly Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) features in the tasks of body-site identification and Crohn's disease prediction. Aside from being more accurate, using k-mer features in shallow sub-samples allows (i) skipping computationally costly sequence alignments required in OTU-picking, and (ii) provided a proof of concept for the sufficiency of shallow and short-length 16S rRNA sequencing for phenotype prediction. In addition, k-mer features predicted representative 16S rRNA gene sequences of 18 ecological environments, and 5 organismal environments with high macro-F1 scores of 0.88 and 0.87. For large datasets, deep learning outperformed classical methods such as Random Forest and SVM. Availability: The software and datasets are available at https://llp.berkeley.edu/micropheno.


mSphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick D. Schloss

16S rRNA gene sequencing has engendered significant interest in studying microbial communities. There has been tension between trying to classify 16S rRNA gene sequences to increasingly lower taxonomic levels and the reality that those levels were defined using more sequence and physiological information than is available from a fragment of the 16S rRNA gene.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia A. Ivanova ◽  
Alexey V. Beletsky ◽  
Andrey L. Rakitin ◽  
Vitaly V. Kadnikov ◽  
Dmitriy A. Philippov ◽  
...  

Large areas in Northern Russia are covered by extensive mires, which represent a complex mosaic of ombrotrophic raised bogs, minerotrophic and eutrophic fens, all in a close proximity to each other. In this paper, we compared microbial diversity patterns in the surface peat layers of the neighbouring raised bogs and eutrophic fens that are located within two geographically remote mire sites in Vologda region using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Regardless of location, the microbial communities in raised bogs were highly similar to each other but were clearly distinct from those in eutrophic fens. Bogs were dominated by the Acidobacteria (30%–40% of total 16S rRNA gene reads), which belong to the orders Acidobacteriales and Bryobacterales. Other bog-specific bacteria included the Phycisphaera-like group WD2101 and the families Isosphaeraceae and Gemmataceae of the Planctomycetes, orders Opitutales and Pedosphaerales of the Verrucomicrobia and a particular group of alphaproteobacteria within the Rhizobiales. In contrast, fens hosted Anaerolineae-affiliated Chloroflexi, Vicinamibacteria- and Blastocatellia-affiliated Acidobacteria, Rokubacteria, uncultivated group OM190 of the Planctomycetes and several groups of betaproteobacteria. The Patescibacteria were detected in both types of wetlands but their relative abundance was higher in fens. A number of key parameters that define the distribution of particular bacterial groups in mires were identified.


mSystems ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Karstens ◽  
Mark Asquith ◽  
Sean Davin ◽  
Damien Fair ◽  
W. Thomas Gregory ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTMicrobial communities are commonly studied using culture-independent methods, such as 16S rRNA gene sequencing. However, one challenge in accurately characterizing microbial communities is exogenous bacterial DNA contamination, particularly in low-microbial-biomass niches. Computational approaches to identify contaminant sequences have been proposed, but their performance has not been independently evaluated. To identify the impact of decreasing microbial biomass on polymicrobial 16S rRNA gene sequencing experiments, we created a mock microbial community dilution series. We evaluated four computational approaches to identify and remove contaminants, as follows: (i) filtering sequences present in a negative control, (ii) filtering sequences based on relative abundance, (iii) identifying sequences that have an inverse correlation with DNA concentration implemented in Decontam, and (iv) predicting the sequence proportion arising from defined contaminant sources implemented in SourceTracker. As expected, the proportion of contaminant bacterial DNA increased with decreasing starting microbial biomass, with 80.1% of the most diluted sample arising from contaminant sequences. Inclusion of contaminant sequences led to overinflated diversity estimates and distorted microbiome composition. All methods for contaminant identification successfully identified some contaminant sequences, which varied depending on the method parameters used and contaminant prevalence. Notably, removing sequences present in a negative control erroneously removed >20% of expected sequences. SourceTracker successfully removed over 98% of contaminants when the experimental environments were well defined. However, SourceTracker misclassified expected sequences and performed poorly when the experimental environment was unknown, failing to remove >97% of contaminants. In contrast, the Decontam frequency method did not remove expected sequences and successfully removed 70 to 90% of the contaminants.IMPORTANCEThe relative scarcity of microbes in low-microbial-biomass environments makes accurate determination of community composition challenging. Identifying and controlling for contaminant bacterial DNA are critical steps in understanding microbial communities from these low-biomass environments. Our study introduces the use of a mock community dilution series as a positive control and evaluates four computational strategies that can identify contaminants in 16S rRNA gene sequencing experiments in order to remove them from downstream analyses. The appropriate computational approach for removing contaminant sequences from an experiment depends on prior knowledge about the microbial environment under investigation and can be evaluated with a dilution series of a mock microbial community.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean M. Deguenon ◽  
Nicholas Travanty ◽  
Jiwei Zhu ◽  
Ann Carr ◽  
Steven Denning ◽  
...  

AbstractThe black blow fly, Phormia regina (Meigen) (Diptera: Calliphoridae) is one of the most abundant carrion flies in North America. Calliphorids are important in agriculture and animal production, veterinary sciences, forensics and medical entomology. While the role of flies in the epidemiology of human and animal diseases is an active area of research, little is known about the microorganisms associated with these insects. We examined the diversity of wild-caught black blow fly endogenous (internal body) and exogenous (external body) microbial communities using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Overall, 27 phyla, 171 families and 533 genera were detected, and diversity was significantly higher (P < 0.05) on external body surfaces. At the genus level, Dysgonomonas, Ignatzschineria, Acinetobacter, Vagococcus, Myroides, and Wohlfahrtiimonas were predominant. Cloning and sequencing of nearly full-length fragments of the 16S rRNA gene showed that some of the species identified are known to be pathogenic to humans, animals, and plants. Myroides odoratimimus and Acinetobacter radioresistens are well-known, multi-drug resistant bacteria. These results provide a snapshot of the microbial communities harbored by adult black blow flies and call for more comprehensive studies to better characterize the role these flies may play in the transmission of pathogenic microorganisms.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-101
Author(s):  
Sanju Kumari ◽  
Utkarshini Sharma ◽  
Rohit Krishna ◽  
Kanak Sinha ◽  
Santosh Kumar

Background: Cellulolysis is of considerable economic importance in laundry detergents, textile and pulp and paper industries and in fermentation of biomass into biofuels. Objective: The aim was to screen cellulase producing actinobacteria from the fruit orchard because of its requirement in several chemical reactions. Methods: Strains of actinobacteria were isolated on Sabouraud’s agar medium. Similarities in cultural and biochemical characterization by growing the strains on ISP medium and dissimilarities among them perpetuated to recognise nine groups of actinobacteria. Cellulase activity was measured by the diameter of clear zone around colonies on CMC agar and the amount of reducing sugar liberated from carboxymethyl cellulose in the supernatant of the CMC broth. Further, 16S rRNA gene sequencing and molecular characterization were placed before NCBI for obtaining recognition with accession numbers. Results: Prominent clear zones on spraying Congo Red were found around the cultures of strains of three groups SK703, SK706, SK708 on CMC agar plates. The enzyme assay for carboxymethylcellulase displayed extra cellulase activity in broth: 0.14, 0.82 and 0.66 &#181;mol mL-1 min-1, respectively at optimum conditions of 35°C, pH 7.3 and 96 h of incubation. However, the specific cellulase activities per 1 mg of protein did not differ that way. It was 1.55, 1.71 and 1.83 μmol mL-1 min-1. The growing mycelia possessed short compact chains of 10-20 conidia on aerial branches. These morphological and biochemical characteristics, followed by their verification by Bergey’s Manual, categorically allowed the strains to be placed under actinobacteria. Further, 16S rRNA gene sequencing, molecular characterization and their evolutionary relationship through phylogenetics also confirmed the putative cellulase producing isolates of SK706 and SK708 subgroups to be the strains of Streptomyces. These strains on getting NCBI recognition were christened as Streptomyces glaucescens strain SK91L (KF527284) and Streptomyces rochei strain SK78L (KF515951), respectively. Conclusion: Conclusive evidence on the basis of different parameters established the presence of cellulase producing actinobacteria in the litchi orchard which can convert cellulose into fermentable sugar.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document