Linking pollution induced community tolerance (PICT) and microbial community structure in chronically metal polluted estuarine sediments

Abstract

We tested the ability of pollution induced community tolerance (PICT) to detect the effects of chronic metal pollution on estuarine sediment microbial communities, along a gradient spanning two orders of magnitude in metal concentrations. In tandem, we investigated the associated microbial community structure using terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP). Tolerance of microbes to Cu, measured as IC50 (inhibitory concentration 50%), was strongly correlated with pore water Cu concentration (r2 = 0.842). No strong correlation existed for other metals tested, highlighting the ability of PICT to identify the pollutant causing a toxic effect. There was no correlation between microbial community structure and community tolerance to metals tested, but analysis of community structure did provide some information on reasons for observed PICT response. PICT methodology used here provided a greater strength and consistency of association with pollutant concentration compared to microbial community structure and can be recommended as a sensitive indicator of metal pollution on estuarine sediment microbial communities

Comparison of aerobic and anaerobic [3H]leucine incorporation assays for determining pollution‐induced bacterial community tolerance in copper‐polluted, irrigated soils

“…The [ 3 H]leucine incorporation method has previously been used successfully to measure bacterial growth rates in anoxic, aquatic environments [14,28] and has also proved superior to the competing thymidine incorporation technique for measurement of metal toxicity in sediments [29,30]. The [ 3 H]leucine incorporation technique has greater sensitivity and may give slightly more reliable soil bacterial growth determinations than the thymidine incorporation technique [10,11].…”

Bacterial communities in trace metal contaminated lake sediments are dominated by endospore-forming bacteria

“…One approach is the concept of pollutioninduced community tolerance (PICT), developed as a sensitive tool to detect minor effects of anthropogenic pollution on biological communities (Blanck et al 1988;Blanck 2002). A recent study shows that PICT could be evaluated to test the effect of chronic metal pollution on estuarine sediment microbial communities (Ogilvie and Grant 2008). A link between pore water copper concentrations and PICT was observed.…”

The isolation of heavy-metal resistant culturable bacteria and resistance determinants from a heavy-metal-contaminated site

“…While the acute effect of heavy metals on the microbial community appears to lead to a subsequent shift in the community toward a more metaltolerant or metal-resistant population (Ranjard et al 2000;Sandaa et al 2001), in chronically contaminated sites natural selection should have resulted in a predominantly metal-tolerant community (Kandeler et al 2000;Becker et al 2006). Many studies have focused on the effects of heavy metals on bacterial community structure (Ranjard et al 2006;Ogilvie & Grant 2008;Khan et al 2010;Pechrada et al 2010), and relatively many bacteria have already been isolated from different heavy-metal-contaminated environments and their metabolic pathways for pollutant detoxification have been studied in detail. These studies included the mercury-reducing bacteria Bacillus megaterium MB1 (Huang et al 1999); the cadmium-accumulating bacteria Rhodospirillum rubrum (Smiejan et al 2003); strains resistant to multiple heavy metals (Schmidt & Schlegel 1994;Taghavi et al 1994;Mergeay et al 2003); bacteria specific to HgCl 2 -contaminated soils, such as Duganella violaceinigra, Lysobacter koreensis and Bacillus panaciterrae (Mera & Iwasaki 2007); cadmium-resistant bacteria, such as Alcaligenes xylosoxidans, Comamonas testosteroni, Klebsiella planticola, Pseudomonas fluorescens and Serratia liquefaciens (Chovanová et al 2004); Ochrobactrum sp.…”