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. 2019 Nov 30;7(12):632.
doi: 10.3390/microorganisms7120632.

Effects of a Simulated Acute Oil Spillage on Bacterial Communities from Arctic and Antarctic Marine Sediments

Carmen Rizzo  1 , Roberta Malavenda  1 , Berna Gerçe  2 , Maria Papale  3 , Christoph Syldatk  2 , Rudolf Hausmann  4 , Vivia Bruni  1 , Luigi Michaud  1 , Angelina Lo Giudice  1   3 , Stefano Amalfitano  5
Affiliations

Effects of a Simulated Acute Oil Spillage on Bacterial Communities from Arctic and Antarctic Marine Sediments

Carmen Rizzo et al. Microorganisms. .

Abstract

Background: The bacterial community responses to oil spill events are key elements to predict the fate of hydrocarbon pollution in receiving aquatic environments. In polar systems, cold temperatures and low irradiance levels can limit the effectiveness of contamination removal processes. In this study, the effects of a simulated acute oil spillage on bacterial communities from polar sediments were investigated, by assessing the role of hydrocarbon mixture, incubation time and source bacterial community in selecting oil-degrading bacterial phylotypes.

Methods: The bacterial hydrocarbon degradation was evaluated by gas chromatography. Flow cytometric and fingerprinting profiles were used to assess the bacterial community dynamics over the experimental incubation time.

Results: Direct responses to the simulated oil spill event were found from both Arctic and Antarctic settings, with recurrent bacterial community traits and diversity profiles, especially in crude oil enrichment. Along with the dominance of Pseudomonas spp., members of the well-known hydrocarbon degraders Granulosicoccus spp. and Cycloclasticus spp. were retrieved from both sediments.

Conclusions: Our findings indicated that polar bacterial populations are able to respond to the detrimental effects of simulated hydrocarbon pollution, by developing into a more specialized active oil degrading community.

Keywords: antarctic; arctic; biodegradation; bioremediation; hydrocarbons; microcosms; sediment.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Residual hydrocarbons in Arctic microcosms enriched with crude oil (a) and diesel oil (b) over the incubation time (0, 90, and 160 days of incubation). Overall biodegradation of hydrocarbon mixtures (c).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Residual hydrocarbons in Antarctic microcosms enriched with crude oil (a) and diesel oil (b) over the incubation time (0, 90, and 160 days of incubation). Overall biodegradation of hydrocarbon mixtures (c).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Patterns of the total prokaryotic cell counts as assessed by flow cytometry in Arctic and Antarctic microcosms. Data are presented as fold increase of microbial abundance in contaminated sediments with respect to the control treatments.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The bacterial richness expressed as the number of T-RFs (T-RFLP) detected in the microcosms samples from two experimental treatments (crude oil and diesel oil) in three sampling times (TRF30: 30 days of incubation; TRF60: 60 days of incubation; TRF160: 160 days of incubation). The different simple and capital letters denote statistically significant differences among each sampling times in Arctic and microcosms; NS—not significant different (ANOVA, p = 0.05).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Venn diagrams showing phylotypes distribution in Arctic and Antarctic microcosms detected by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) analysis.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) computed on Bray–Curtis similarities calculated presence/absence matrix obtained from DGGE analysis for (a) Arctic and (b) Antarctic microcosms.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS) computed on Bray–Curtis similarities calculated from DGGE analysis results, plotted by clustering data according to sediment origin.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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