Beach sand oil spills select for generalist microbial populations
Abstract
The specialization-disturbance hypothesis predicts that, in the event of a disturbance, generalists are favored, while specialists are selected against. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested in microbial systems and it remains unclear to what extent it could explain microbial community succession patterns following perturbations. Previous field observations of Pensacola Beach sands that were impacted by the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill provided evidence in support of the specialization-disturbance hypothesis. However, ecological drift as well as uncounted environmental fluctuations (e.g., storms) could not be ruled out as confounding factors driving these field results. In this study, the specialization-disturbance hypothesis was tested on beach sands, disturbed by DWH crude oil, ex situ in closed laboratory advective-flow chambers that mimic in situ conditions in saturated beach sediments. The chambers were inoculated with weathered DWH oil and unamended chambers served as controls. The time series of shotgun metagenomic and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequence data from a two-month long incubation showed that functional diversity significantly increased while taxonomic diversity significantly declined, indicating a decrease in specialist taxa. Thus, results from this laboratory study corroborate field observations, providing verification that the specialization-disturbance hypothesis can explain microbial succession patterns in crude oil impacted beach sands.
Additional Information
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This research was made possible by a grant from The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (Grant No 321611-00; RFP V). Data availability. All sequencing data is available through the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under BioProject identifiers PRJNA722673 (mesocosm experiment amplicons), PRJNA690167 (mesocosm metagenomes), and PRJNA260285 (field experiment). Additional metadata is available through the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information & Data Cooperative (GRIIDC) at https://data.gulfresearchinitiative.org/data/R5.x278.000:0001. The authors declare no competing interest.Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC8528907
- Eprint ID
- 118344
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20221215-540095000.4
- 321611-00
- Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
- Created
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2022-12-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-12-17Created from EPrint's last_modified field