Response of soil enzyme activities and bacterial communities to the accumulation of microplastics in an acid cropped soil.

By Y. Fei, Shunyin Huang, Haibo Zhang, Yazhi Tong, Dishi Wen, Xiaoyu Xia, Han Wang, Yongming Luo, D. Barceló. Science of the Total Environment, 2019

696 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ecological stress of microplastics (MPs) contamination in agroecosystems raise worldwide concerns. However very few studies concentrated on the effects of MPs exposure on soil microbial community. The alterations of enzymatic activities and bacterial communities were assayed by spiking 1% and 5% (w/w) of polyethylene (PE) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) MPs in an acid soil. The results showed that both PE and PVC addition inhibited fluorescein diacetate hydrolase activity and stimulated urease and acid phosphatase activities, and declined the richness and diversity of the bacterial communities. More severe effects were observed in the PE treated soils compared to the PVC treated soils generally. The relative abundances of families Burkholderiaceae increased significantly (p < .05) after MPs addition, suggesting the bacteria associated with nitrogen fixation stimulated by the MPs input. Meanwhile, significant (p < .05) decline of Sphingomonadaceae and Xanthobacteraceae after addition of 5% PVC and 1% PE MPs, respectively implied that MPs might inhibit the biodegradation of xenobiotics in the soil. Mover, the PICRUSt analysis demonstrated that membrane transporter was a sensitive prediction functional gene of microplastics exposure in the soil. Future studies could be focused on the role of MPs on the regulation of nitrogen cycling and organic compounds degradation in soils.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28cf333668cd0af9d67a69438228b9f0ec2a710c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomaterials

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

In Pollution

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

Citations in the corpus

• Microplastic fiber and drought effects on plants and soil are only slightly modified by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (2020, background): “Thus the type and polymer of plastic and soil parameters were suggested to be important modulators affecting the composition of the soil microbial community and changes in their metabolic activity (Machado et al., 2018b; Liang et al., 2019; Fei et al., 2020).”