Niche specificity of ammonia-oxidizing archaeal and bacterial communities in a freshwater wetland receiving municipal wastewater in Daqing, Northeast China

Kwok Ho Lee, Yong Feng Wang, Hui Li, Ji Dong Gu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ecophysiological differences between ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) enable them to adapt to different niches in complex freshwater wetland ecosystems. The community characters of AOA and AOB in the different niches in a freshwater wetland receiving municipal wastewater, as well as the physicochemical parameters of sediment/soil samples, were investigated in this study. AOA community structures varied and separated from each other among four different niches. Wetland vegetation including aquatic macrophytes and terrestrial plants affected the AOA community composition but less for AOB, whereas sediment depths might contribute to the AOB community shift. The diversity of AOA communities was higher than that of AOB across all four niches. Archaeal and bacterial amoA genes (encoding for the alpha-subunit of ammonia monooxygenases) were most diverse in the dry-land niche, indicating O2 availability might favor ammonia oxidation. The majority of AOA amoA sequences belonged to the Soil/sediment Cluster B in the freshwater wetland ecosystems, while the dominant AOB amoA sequences were affiliated with Nitrosospira-like cluster. In the Nitrosospira-like cluster, AOB amoA gene sequences affiliated with the uncultured ammonia-oxidizing beta-proteobacteria constituted the largest portion (99 %). Moreover, independent methods for phylogenetic tree analysis supported high parsimony bootstrap values. As a consequence, it is proposed that Nitrosospira-like amoA gene sequences recovered in this study represent a potentially novel cluster, grouping with the sequences from Gulf of Mexico deposited in the public databases.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2081-2091
Number of pages11
JournalEcotoxicology
Volume23
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - 21 Nov 2014
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Ammonia-oxidizing archaea
  • Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria
  • Pollution
  • Wetland
  • amoA gene

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