Sediment Microbial Diversity in Urban Piedmont North Carolina Watersheds Receiving Wastewater Input
Sandra Clinton,
James Johnson,
Kevin Lambirth,
Shan Sun,
Cory Brouwer,
Olya Keen,
Molly Redmond,
Anthony Fodor,
Cynthia Gibas
Affiliations
Sandra Clinton
Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
James Johnson
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Kevin Lambirth
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Shan Sun
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Cory Brouwer
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Olya Keen
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Molly Redmond
Department of Biological Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Anthony Fodor
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Cynthia Gibas
Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA
Urban streams are heavily influenced by human activity. One way that this occurs is through the reintroduction of treated effluent from wastewater treatment plants. We measured the microbial community composition of water, sediment, and soil at sites upstream and downstream from two Charlotte treatment facilities. We performed 16S rRNA gene sequencing to assay the microbial community composition at each site at four time points between the late winter and mid-summer of 2016. Despite the location of these streams in an urban area with many influences and disruptions, the streams maintain distinct water, sediment, and soil microbial profiles. While there is an overlap of microbial species in upstream and downstream sites, there are several taxa that differentiate these sites. Some taxa characteristics of human-associated microbial communities appear elevated in the downstream sediment communities. In the wastewater treatment plant and to a lesser extent in the downstream community, there are high abundance amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) which are less than 97% similar to any sequence in reference databases, suggesting that these environments contain an unexplored biological novelty. Taken together, these results suggest a need to more fully characterize the microbial communities associated with urban streams, and to integrate information about microbial community composition with mechanistic models.
