Response of Bacterial Communities to Heavy Metal Contamination in an Abandoned Chromate Factory

Abstract

The chromium slags left by industry emission has caused serious damage to the local ecological environment, and microorganisms were sensitive to the variation in the surrounding environmental factors. In this work, 14 soil samples around an abandoned chromate factory were collected. We utilized the 16S rRNA regions from soil DNA to explore the possible effects of environmental factors on soil bacterial communities. High-throughput DNA sequencing results suggested that bacterial communities varied greatly from different soil samples, but Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were predominant in all samples in the phylum level. In addition, Pseudarthrobacter, Thiobacillus, Paenisporosarcina, Sphingomonas, and Bacillus were abundant at a more refined species level. Based on redundancy analysis (RDA) and variation partitioning analysis (VPA), the results revealed that pH value, soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), chromium (Cr) and lead (Pb) could obviously affect the bacterial community structure. Heavy metals, soil nutrients, and pH could explain 37.69%, 13.61%, and 31.41% of bacterial community variation, respectively. This study would provide a theoretical basis for future remediation of local Cr-contaminated soil.

Keywords:

• Bacterial community
• Cr contamination
• heavy metals
• environmental factors
• chromate factory

Acknowledgement

We are grateful grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41672332), the National Key Research and Development Project of China (2019YFC1805901), and the National Basic Research Program of China (2014CB846003). We thank all our colleagues and students who were involved in this work for their unremitting efforts. We thank Li Chen at the school of physics, Peking University. We also thank all the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this manuscript.

Authors contributions

Bing Shan: Writing – original draft, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Ruixia Hao: Writing – review and editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Hui Xu: Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation. Jiani Li, Junman Zhang, Yinhuang Li and Yubo Ye: Investigation and data collection. Anhuai Lu: review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statements

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This study was part-funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41672332], National Key Research and Development Project of China [2019YFC1805901] and National Basic Research Program of China [2014CB846003].