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Impact of mercury on denitrification and denitrifying microbial communities in nitrate enrichments of subsurface sediments

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Abstract

The contamination of groundwater with mercury (Hg) is an increasing problem worldwide. Yet, little is known about the interactions of Hg with microorganisms and their processes in subsurface environments. We tested the impact of Hg on denitrification in nitrate reducing enrichment cultures derived from subsurface sediments from the Oak Ridge Integrated Field Research Challenge site, where nitrate is a major contaminant and where bioremediation efforts are in progress. We observed an inverse relationship between Hg concentrations and onset and rates of denitrification in nitrate enrichment cultures containing between 53 and 1.1 μM of inorganic Hg; higher Hg concentrations increasingly extended the time to onset of denitrification and inhibited denitrification rates. Microbial community complexity, as indicated by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (tRFLP) analysis of the 16S rRNA genes, declined with increasing Hg concentrations; at the 312 nM Hg treatment, a single tRFLP peak was detected representing a culture of Bradyrhizobium sp. that possessed the merA gene indicating a potential for Hg reduction. A culture identified as Bradyrhizobium sp. strain FRC01 with an identical 16S rRNA sequence to that of the enriched peak in the tRFLP patterns, reduced Hg(II) to Hg(0) and carried merA whose amino acid sequence has 97 % identity to merA from the Proteobacteria and Firmicutes. This study demonstrates that in subsurface sediment incubations, Hg may inhibit denitrification and that inhibition may be alleviated when Hg resistant denitrifying Bradyrhizobium spp. detoxify Hg by its reduction to the volatile elemental form.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank David Watson and the team at the Oak Ridge IFRC site for providing sediment cores. This research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), U.S. Department of Energy Grant DE-FG02-08ER64544.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Rutgers University, 223C Lipman Hall, 76 Lipman Dr., New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Yanping Wang, Ria John & Tamar Barkay

  2. Department of Biology, Clark University, Worcester, MA, 01610-1477, USA

    Heather A. Wiatrowski

  3. Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan, 32001, Taiwan

    Chu-Ching Lin

  4. Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Lily Y. Young & Nathan Yee

  5. Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Lee J. Kerkhof

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  1. Yanping Wang
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Wang, Y., Wiatrowski, H.A., John, R. et al. Impact of mercury on denitrification and denitrifying microbial communities in nitrate enrichments of subsurface sediments. Biodegradation 24, 33–46 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10532-012-9555-8

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