Abstract
Intertidal mudflats are susceptible to oil pollution due to their proximity to discharges from industries, accidental spills from marine shipping activities, oil drilling, pipeline seepages, and river outflows. The experimental study was divided into two periods. In the first period, microcosm trials were carried out to examine the effect of chemically modified biochar on biological hydrocarbon removal from sediments. The modified biochar’s surface area increased from 2.544 to 25.378 m2/g, followed by a corresponding increase in the hydrogen-carbon and oxygen-carbon ratio, indicating improved stability and polarity. In the second period, the effect of exogenous fungus — Scedoporium sp. ZYY on the bacterial community structure was examined in relation to total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) removal. The maximum TPH removal efficiency of 82.4% was achieved in treatments with the modified biochar, followed by a corresponding increase in Fluorescein diacetate hydrolysis activity. Furthermore, high-throughput 16S RNA gene sequencing employed to identify changes in the bacterial community of the original sediment and treatments before and after fungal inoculation revealed Proteobacteria as the dominant phylum. In addition, it was observed that Scedoporium sp. ZYY promoted the proliferation of specific TPH-degraders, particularly, Hyphomonas adhaerens which accounted for 77% of the total degrading populations in treatments where TPH removal was highest. Findings in this study provide valuable insights into the effect of modified biochar and the fundamental role of exogenous fungus towards the effective degradation of oil-contaminated intertidal mudflat sediments.
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The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to confidentiality requirements, but are available from the corresponding author on request.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Research Funds of the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Theory and Technology for Environmental Pollution Control (No.2001K004), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51978189), and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (LY20C030004).
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Edidiong Okokon Atakpa: conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, data curation, writing — original draft. Bozhi Yan: investigation, formal analysis, data curation. Samuel Ukpong Okon: investigation, editing. Qing Liu: investigation. Dongdong Zhang: investigation. Chunfang Zhang: validation, writing — review and editing, project administration.
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Highlights
• Chemically modified biochar accelerated degradation rate within the first 21 days.
• Taxonomic groups originally present in low abundance improved predominantly after fungal addition.
• Fungi promoted the abundance of pollutant-degrading bacterial species while impeding the abundance of non-degraders.
• Overall degradation process impeded bacterial diversity.
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Atakpa, E.O., Yan, B., Okon, S.U. et al. Asynchronous application of modified biochar and exogenous fungus Scedosporium sp. ZYY for enhanced degradation of oil-contaminated intertidal mudflat sediment. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 20637–20650 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32419-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32419-6