Project description:<p>A variety of anthropogenic organohalide contaminants generated from industry are released into the environment, and thus cause serious pollution that endangers human health. In the present study, we investigated the microbial community composition of industrial saponification wastewater using 16S rRNA sequencing, providing genomic insights of potential organohalide dehalogenation bacteria (OHDBs) by whole-metagenome sequencing. We also explored yet-to-culture OHDBs involved in the microbial community. Microbial diversity analysis reveals that Proteobacteria and Patescibacteria phyla dominate microbiome abundance of the wastewater. In addition, a total of six bacterial groups (Rhizobiales, Rhodobacteraceae, Rhodospirillales, Flavobạcteriales, Micrococcales, and Saccharimonadales) were found as biomarkers in the key organohalide removal module. Ninety-four metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) were reconstructed from the microbial community, and 105 hydrolytic dehalogenase genes within 42 MAGs were identified, suggesting that the potential for hydrolytic organohalide dehalogenation is present in the microbial community. Subsequently, we characterized the organohalide dehalogenation of an isolated OHDB, Microbacterium sp. J1-1, which shows the dehalogenation activities of chloropropanol, dichloropropanol, and epichlorohydrin. This study provides a community-integrated multi-omics approach to gain functional OHDBs for industrial organohalide dehalogenation.</p>
Project description:Marine sponges are essential for coral reefs to thrive and harbour a diverse microbiome that is thought to contribute to host health. Although the overall function of sponge symbionts has been increasingly described, in-depth characterisation of each taxa remains challenging, with many sponge species hosting up to 3,000 distinct microbial species. Recently, the sponge Ianthella basta has emerged as a model organism for symbiosis research, hosting only three dominant symbionts: a Thaumarchaeotum, a Gammaproteobacterium, and an Alphaproteobacterium and a range of other minor taxa. Here, we retrieved metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs) for >90% of I. basta’s microbial community which allowed us to make a complete metabolic reconstruction of the sponge’s microbiome, identifying metabolic complementarity between microbes, as well as the importance of symbionts present in low abundance. We also mined the metagenomes for putative viral sequences, highlighting the contribution of viruses to the overall metabolism of the sponge, and complement this data with metaproteomic sequencing to identify active metabolic pathways in both prokaryotes and viruses. This data now allows us to use I. basta as a model organism for studying host-microbe interactions and provides a basis for future (genomic) manipulative experiments.
Project description:Mitigation of N2O-emissions from soils is needed to reduce climate forcing by food production. Inoculating soils with N2O-reducing bacteria would be effective, but costly and impractical as a standalone operation. Here we demonstrate that digestates obtained after biogas production may provide a low-cost and widely applicable solution. Firstly, we show that indigenous N2O-reducing bacteria in digestates grow to high levels during anaerobic enrichment under N2O. Gas kinetics and meta-omic analysis show that the N2O respiring organisms, recovered as metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) grow by harvesting fermentation intermediates of the methanogenic consortium. Three digestate-derived denitrifying bacteria were obtained through isolation, one of which matched the recovered MAG of a dominant Dechloromonas-affiliated N2O reducer. While the identified N2O-reducers encoded genes required for a full denitrification pathway and could thus both produce and sequester N2O, their regulatory traits predicted that they act as N2O-sinks in the current system. Secondly, moving towards practical application, we show that these isolates grow by aerobic respiration in digestates, and that fertilization with these enriched digestates reduces N2O emissions. This shows that the ongoing implementation of biogas production in agriculture opens a new avenue for cheap and effective reduction of N2O emissions from food production.
Project description:Sequencing the metatranscriptome can provide information about the response of organisms to varying environmental conditions. We present a methodology for obtaining random whole-community mRNA from a complex microbial assemblage using Pyrosequencing. The metatranscriptome had, with minimum contamination by ribosomal RNA, significant coverage of abundant transcripts, and included significantly more potentially novel proteins than in the metagenome. Keywords: metatranscriptome, mesocosm, ocean acidification