Microbial community Raw sequence reads. wetland metagenome

Engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) are increasingly produced, and they have already been detected in wastewater. Many ENMs are used to take advantage of their antimicrobial properties. Silver (Ag) and copper (Cu) ENMs are two of the most common ENMs and, not coincidentally, two of the most toxic towards microorganisms. Ag and Cu ENMs' toxicities are well established in simple chemical and biological settings, e.g. biological growth medium and pure cultures of bacteria, but these do not necessarily relate to impacts in environmentally relevant settings. Furthermore, ENMs readily transform in the environment, yet studies often only consider the pristine form. We used environmentally relevant emergent freshwater wetland mesocosms, pristine and transformed ENMs and a long-term study design to see if transformation and environmental resilience mitigated ENMs' impacts on microbial communities. qPCR and high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing were employed to assess impacts on microbial communities.