ArticleThe ISME journal2015
Microbial community successional patterns in beach sands impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Article in The ISME journal, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
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56 citing papers in PubMed, 171 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Close encounters on a micro scale: microplastic sorption of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their potential effects on associated biofilm communities.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Bacterial community composition in the Northern Gulf of Mexico intertidal sediment bioturbated by the ghost shrimp Lepidophthalmus louisianensis.Antonie van Leeuwenhoek · 2024Article
- Species-specific responses of marine bacteria to environmental perturbation.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Hydrodynamic disturbance controls microbial community assembly and biogeochemical processes in coastal sediments.The ISME journal · 2022Article
- Chronic Environmental Perturbation Influences Microbial Community Assembly Patterns.Environmental science & technology · 2022Article
- Beach sand oil spills select for generalist microbial populations.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Metabolic flexibility allows bacterial habitat generalists to become dominant in a frequently disturbed ecosystem.The ISME journal · 2021Article
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- Isolation Chip Increases Culturable Bacterial Diversity and Reduces Cultivation Bias.Current microbiology · 2021Article
- High-throughput molecular analyses of microbiomes as a tool to monitor the wellbeing of aquatic environments.Microbial biotechnology · 2021Review
- Distinct ecotypes within a natural haloarchaeal population enable adaptation to changing environmental conditions without causing population sweeps.The ISME journal · 2021Article
- Response of soil bacterial communities to high petroleum content in the absence of remediation procedures.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2021Article
- Carbon fixation and rhodopsin systems in microbial mats from hypersaline lakes Brava and Tebenquiche, Salar de Atacama, Chile.PloS one · 2021Article
- Snow microbiome functional analyses reveal novel aspects of microbial metabolism of complex organic compounds.MicrobiologyOpen · 2020Article
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- A Role for Gut Microbiome Fermentative Pathways in Fatty Liver Disease Progression.Journal of clinical medicine · 2020Review
- Metagenomics as a Public Health Risk Assessment Tool in a Study of Natural Creek Sediments Influenced by Agricultural and Livestock Runoff: Potential and Limitations.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although petroleum hydrocarbons discharged from the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout were shown to have a pronounced impact on indigenous microbial communities in the Gulf of Mexico, effects on nearshore or coastal ecosystems remain understudied. This study investigated the successional patterns of functional and taxonomic diversity for over 1 year after the DWH oil was deposited on Pensacola Beach sands (FL, USA), using metagenomic and 16S rRNA gene amplicon techniques. Gamma- and Alphaproteobacteria were enriched in oiled sediments, in corroboration of previous studies. In contrast to previous studies, we observed an increase in the functional diversity of the community in response to oil contamination and a functional transition from generalist populations within 4 months after oil came ashore to specialists a year later, when oil was undetectable. At the latter time point, a typical beach community had reestablished that showed little to no evidence of oil hydrocarbon degradation potential, was enriched in archaeal taxa known to be sensitive to xenobiotics, but differed significantly from the community before the oil spill. Further, a clear succession pattern was observed, where early responders to oil contamination, likely degrading aliphatic hydrocarbons, were replaced after 3 months by populations capable of aromatic hydrocarbon decomposition. Collectively, our results advance the understanding of how natural benthic microbial communities respond to crude oil perturbation, supporting the specialization-disturbance hypothesis; that is, the expectation that disturbance favors generalists, while providing (microbial) indicator species and genes for the chemical evolution of oil hydrocarbons during degradation and weathering.
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