The overuse of herbicide chlorimuron-ethyl (CE) brings ecological risks to natural ecosystems. Microbial consortium, a natural community of microbes or a man-made microbial co-culture, has shown great potential for the bio-remediation of herbicide-polluted environment.

Prof. ZHANG Huiwen, Prof. XU Mingkai and doctoral student LI Xiang are researchers from the Microbial Resources and Ecology Group of the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This group of researchers recently established a microbial enrichment culture system using the soil contaminated with CE and obtained a microbial consortium capable of degrading CE.

The researchers found that the microbial consortium, designated as L1, could degrade CE efficiently, and that Methyloversatilis, Pseudoxanthomonas, Methylopila, Hyphomicrobium, Stenotrophomonas, Sphingomonas were the genera most responsible for the degradation of CE when testing with bioinformatics tools.

In addition, the researchers found cross-feeding, co-metabolic and synergistic relationships between 'functional bacteria' with degradation capacity, and even between the 'functional bacteria' and the 'auxiliary bacteria' without degradation capacity.  

This study clarified the microbial degradation pathways of chlorimuron-ethyl, and unearthed new microbial resources for remediation of herbicide-polluted environment. The researchers suggested optimizing the design of consortium models to explore the way to regulate microbial community structure, metabolism and function.

The study entitled "Characterizing the microbial consortium L1 capable of efficiently degrading chlorimuron-ethyl via metagenome combining 16S rDNA sequencing" has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.

The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Major S&T Achievement Transformation Project of Shenyang Municipal Science and Technology Bureau, and the Doctoral Start-up Fund of Liaoning Province.

Contact 

YUE Qian

Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 

Tel: 86-24-83970324 

E-mail: yueqian@iae.ac.cn  

Web: http://english.iae.cas.cn