Project description:Groundwater-derived microorganisms are known to play an important role in biogeochemical C, S and N cycling. Thereby, the presence and majorly the activity of microorganisms in aquifers affect enormously the nutrient cycling. However, the diversity and their functional capability in natural aquifers are still rare and therefore a better knowledge of the core microbial communities is urgently needed. Metaproteome analysis was applied to characterize the repertoire of microbes in the depth and to identify the key drivers of major biogeochemical processes. Therefore, 1000 L water from the aquifer was sampled by filtration on 0.3 µm glass filters. After protein extraction, proteolytic cleavage and mass spectrometric analysis (Ultimate 3000 nanoRSLC coupled to Q Exactive HF instrument), 3808 protein groups (2371 proteins with ≥2 peptides) were identified from 13,204 peptides. The findings of our study have broad implications for the understanding of aquifer cycling’s which finally leads to a greatly improved understanding of the ecosystem services provided by the microbial communities present in aquifers. In the future, functional results would allow to monitor and to assess pollution effects which would beneficially assist groundwater resource management.
Project description:Xiangjiang River (Hunan, China) has been contaminated with heavy metal for several decades by surrounding factories. However, little is known about the influence of a gradient of heavy metal contamination on the diversity, structure of microbial functional gene in sediment. To deeply understand the impact of heavy metal contamination on microbial community, a comprehensive functional gene array (GeoChip 5.0) has been used to study the functional genes structure, composition, diversity and metabolic potential of microbial community from three heavy metal polluted sites of Xiangjiang River. Three groups of samples, A, B and C. Every group has 3 replicates.
Project description:Abstract. Microbial gas fermentation remains a promising biotechnology for the production of a variety of industrially relevant chemicals under relatively benign conditions using ubiquitous feedstocks, such as carbon dioxide. Implementation of these gas fermentation processes requires an understanding of the microbial response to different ratios of the gaseous feedstocks (carbon dioxide, oxygen, and hydrogen) supplied to the reactor. Here, we used Cupriavidus necator (strain ATCC 17699 / DSM 428 / KCTC 22496 / NCIMB 10442 / H16 / Stanier 337) as a microbial biocatalyst due to its metabolic diversity, genetic tractability, and ability to grow to high cell densities during aerobic fermentation in bioreactors. Specifically, we investigate whether the supply of different proportions of hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the gas stream (1:1, 3:1, and 8:1 H2:CO2) affects the physiology of C. necator, with a focus on the accumulation of single cell protein (SCP) and poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) within the microbial biomass. We found that an 8:1 ratio of H2:CO2 led to both the highest overall biomass production and PHB content within the biomass after a seven-day incubation. Intracellular SCP content varied as a function of both length of incubation and gas ratio supplied. We conducted a proteomic analysis to determine whether differences in productivity could be correlated with changes in protein expression over time and across treatment groups. This study highlights the importance of considering gaseous substrate composition and its potential effects on microbial physiology and metabolism during fermentation.
Project description:Soil transplant serves as a proxy to simulate climate change in realistic climate regimes. Here, we assessed the effects of climate warming and cooling on soil microbial communities, which are key drivers in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles, four years after soil transplant over large transects from northern (N site) to central (NC site) and southern China (NS site) and vice versa. Four years after soil transplant, soil nitrogen components, microbial biomass, community phylogenetic and functional structures were altered. Microbial functional diversity, measured by a metagenomic tool named GeoChip, and phylogenetic diversity are increased with temperature, while microbial biomass were similar or decreased. Nevertheless, the effects of climate change was overridden by maize cropping, underscoring the need to disentangle them in research. Mantel tests and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) demonstrated that vegetation, climatic factors (e.g., temperature and precipitation), soil nitrogen components and CO2 efflux were significantly correlated to the microbial community composition. Further investigation unveiled strong correlations between carbon cycling genes and CO2 efflux in bare soil but not cropped soil, and between nitrogen cycling genes and nitrification, which provides mechanistic understanding of these microbe-mediated processes and empowers an interesting possibility of incorporating bacterial gene abundance in greenhouse gas emission modeling.
Project description:Xiangjiang River (Hunan, China) has been contaminated with heavy metal for several decades by surrounding factories. However, little is known about the influence of a gradient of heavy metal contamination on the diversity, structure of microbial functional gene in sediment. To deeply understand the impact of heavy metal contamination on microbial community, a comprehensive functional gene array (GeoChip 5.0) has been used to study the functional genes structure, composition, diversity and metabolic potential of microbial community from three heavy metal polluted sites of Xiangjiang River.