Unraveling positive effect of soil moisture on bioaugmentation of petroleum-contaminated soil using Bioinformatics

Petroleum contamination is a severe threat to the soil environment. Previous studies demonstrated that petroleum remediation efficiency relating to the soil moisture content. However, we lack a holistic understanding of how moisture content affected soil microbiomes during bioaugmentation. This study investigated the co-occurrence networks and functional pathways of microbial community structures in the contaminated soils with different moisture (5%, 15%) using chemical analysis, metagenomic analysis, LDA effect size and KEGG database annotation. Results indicated that petroleum biodegradation efficiency was improved by 8.06% in the soils with 15% moisture content when compared with that of 5% moisture content.

石油污染是土壤环境面临的严峻威胁。既往研究表明，石油污染修复效率与土壤含水量密切相关。然而，目前学界尚缺乏对生物强化过程中含水量如何影响土壤微生物组的全面认知。本研究采用化学分析、宏基因组分析（metagenomic analysis）、线性判别分析效应量（LDA Effect Size）以及KEGG（京都基因与基因组百科全书）数据库注释等方法，探究了不同含水量（5%、15%）的石油污染土壤中微生物群落结构的共现网络与功能通路。结果显示，相较于含水量5%的土壤，含水量15%的土壤中石油生物降解效率提升了8.06%。