Submerged paddy soil with powdered rice straw was incubated anaerobically. In the presence of 10 p.M of EDTA, the amount of Fe(II) significantly increased during the early stage of incubation. This finding suggests that EDTA extracted some part of Fe(III), which was utilized then by Fe(III)-reducing bacteria. These increase in the Fe(II) content was accompanied both by the suppression of sulfate-reduction and by the enhancement of acetic acid (AA}-decomposition. The addition of EDTA did not enhance the CH 4 -production during the early stage of incubation. These findings suggest that the reduction of the EDTA-extractable Fe (III) resulted in electron deficiency and that the electron flow was mainly diverted from sulfate reduction to Fe(III)-reduction in the early stage of incubation. As a result of this electron deficiency, Fe(III)-reducing bacteria may utilize AA as an electron donor. The addition of EDT A enhanced both the production and the decomposition of AA in the late stage of incubation as well as the CH 4 -production. These facts suggest that the reduction of the EDTA-extractable Fe (III) in the early stage of incubation decreased the redox potential, which in turn shortened the duration of the lag period of the anaerobic reactions in the late stage.Key Words: acetic acid, EDTA, Fe(III)-reduction, methane-production, sulfate-reduction.
155Although fresh organic materials such as rice straw are important elements for rice cultivation, their incorporation into paddy fields sometimes inhibits the growth of rice plant. Especially in cool areas, the accumulation of volatile fatty acids (VF As) gen~rated as intermediate products of the decomposition of organic matter in paddy soil (Takijima 1963) has been considered to be one of the factors responsible for the inhibition. VFAs consist mainly of acetic acid (AA) followed by propionic, iso-, and n-butyric acid (Inubushi et al. 1984) and most of these products are decomposed into methane (CH 4 ) and/or carbon dioxide (C0 2 ) via AA. These decompositions are carried out by anaerobic bacteria such as methane-producing bacteria (MPBs) and sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRBs) (Inubushi et al. 1984;Hori et al. 1990a).In the previous paper (Nozoe and Yoshida 1992), it was reported that AA-decomposition and CHrproduction were suppressed by the addition of 20 mg (0.34 mmol) kg-1 soil of Ni 2 + to submerged paddy soil, but enhanced by the addition of Ni (20 mg kg-1 soil)-ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDT A). These facts suggest the following three possibilities regarding the influence of Ni-EDT A on the AA-decomposition. In this report, laboratory studies were conducted to analyze the effect of the addition of EDT A both on the reduction process including the decomposition of AA and the activities of anaerobic bacteria in flooded paddy soil with rice straw.
MATERIALS AND METHODSSoils. Paddy soil samples were collected from the plow layer (0-13 cm) of a long term experiment field (Gray Lowland soil) at Tohoku National Experiment Station (Omagari, Akita Prefecture). This fi...