Effects of environmental variables on abundance of ammonia-oxidizing communities in sediments of Luotian River, China

Amjed Ginawi; Lixiao Wang; Huading Wang; Bingbing Yu; Yan Yunjun

doi:10.7717/peerj.8256

Effects of environmental variables on abundance of ammonia-oxidizing communities in sediments of Luotian River, China

PeerJ. 2020 Jan 6:8:e8256. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8256. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Amjed Ginawi^{1

2}, Lixiao Wang¹, Huading Wang¹, Bingbing Yu¹, Yan Yunjun¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Lab of Molecular Biophysics of Ministry of Education, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China.
² Faculty of Marine Science and Fisheries, Red Sea University, Port Sudan, Red Sea State, Sudan.

Abstract

Ammonia-oxidizing communities play important functional roles in the nitrification. However, environmental stresses can significantly affect this process by controlling the abundant communities of ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) communities. In this study, we examined the abundance variations of ammonia-oxidizing communities using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and terminal-restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) in a typical subtropical river, Luotian County, South Dabie Mountains, China. Clone libraries were conducted to evaluate the community structure and abundance of AOA and AOB in sediments. Results showed that Nitrososphaera sp and Nitrosopumilus sp were the most dominant AOA. The abundance of the AOA and AOB amoA gene ranged from 5.28 × 10⁸ gene copies (g-soil^-1) to 2.23 × 10⁸ gene copies (g-soil^-1) and 5.45 × 10⁸ gene copies (g-soil^-1) to 3.30 × 10⁷ gene copies (g-soil^-1), respectively. Five environmental variables, namely, ORP, DO, NO $_{3}^{-}$ , Temp, and NH $_{4}^{+}$ were played a major function in microbial communities of AOA and AOB in sediments. The T-RFLP profiles of AOA showed that 488 and 116 bp T-RFs were dominated. Overall, the results of this study showed that anthropogenic activities andenvironmental stress in rivers can alter the structure and function of microbes in their variable environment.

Keywords: Ammonia-oxidizing archaea; Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria; Functional marker genes; Luotian river.

Grants and funding

This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 31070089, J1103514, and 31170078), the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (grant Nos. 2014AA093510 and 2013AA065805), the National Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (grant No. 2015CFA085), and the Fundamental Research Funds for HUST (grant Nos. 2014NY007, 2017KFTSZZ001, 2017KFXKJC010, and 2017KFYXJJ212). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.