Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY
Volume 20, Issue 8, Pages 2796-2808Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.14120
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Funding
- Joint Programming Initiative Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans (JPI-Oceans) WEATHER-MIC project by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS) [942-2015-1866]
- FORMAS [216-2013-1010]
- BONUS, the joint Baltic Sea research and development program (Art 185)
- European Union
- Sweden's Innovation Agency (VINNOVA) [2017-00979]
- SNIC through Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX) [b2016324]
- Vinnova [2017-00979] Funding Source: Vinnova
- Formas [2017-00979] Funding Source: Formas
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In aquatic ecosystems, microplastics are a relatively new anthropogenic substrate that can readily be colonized by biofilm-forming organisms. To examine the effects of substrate type on microbial community assembly, we exposed ambient Baltic bacterioplankton to plastic substrates commonly found in marine environments (polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene) as well as native (cellulose) and inert (glass beads) particles for 2 weeks under controlled conditions. The source microbial communities and those of the biofilms were analyzed by Illumina sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene libraries. All biofilm communities displayed lower diversity and evenness compared with the source community, suggesting substrate-driven selection. Moreover, the plastics-associated communities were distinctly different from those on the non-plastic substrates. Whereas plastics hosted greater than twofold higher abundance of Burkholderiales, the non-plastic substrates had a significantly higher proportion of Actinobacteria and Cytophagia. Variation in the community structure, but not the cell abundance, across the treatments was strongly linked to the substrate hydrophobicity. Thus, microplastics host distinct bacterial communities, at least during early successional stages.
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