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.

石油污染对土壤环境构成严重威胁。既往研究表明，石油修复效率与土壤含水率密切相关。然而，目前我们尚缺乏对生物强化（bioaugmentation）过程中含水率如何影响土壤微生物组（microbiome）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数据库注释等方法，探究了不同含水率（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，相较于含水率为5%的土壤，含水率15%的土壤中石油生物降解效率提升了8.06%。