Bacterial Communities in Concrete Reflect Its Composite Nature and Change with Weathering.

ABSTRACT: Concrete is an extreme but common environment and is home to microbial communities adapted to alkaline, saline, and oligotrophic conditions. Microbes inside the concrete that makes up buildings or roads have received little attention despite their ubiquity and capacity to interact with the concrete. Because concrete is a composite of materials which have their own microbial communities, we hypothesized that the microbial communities of concrete reflect those of the concrete components and that these communities change as the concrete ages. Here, we used a 16S amplicon study to show how microbial communities change over 2 years of outdoor weathering in two sets of concrete cylinders, one prone to the concrete-degrading alkali-silica reaction (ASR) and the other having the risk of the ASR mi

SUBMITTER: Kiledal EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8269252 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature