Bacterial specialists playing crucial roles in maintaining system stability and governing microbial diversity in bioremediation of oil-polluted sediments under typical deep-sea condition.

Ecologically, interactions and contributions of microbiota generalists and specialists remain largely unexplored in remediation of deep-sea oil pollution. Herein, ecological and evolutionary characteristics of the two taxa were comprehensively investigated in restoration of oil-polluted sediment at deep-sea microcosm. Niche-specialized taxa exhibited rapid speciation rate, more complex network structure and highly interspecific mutualism. In contrast, generalists possessed higher richness but with poor local performance, as evidenced by higher extinction rate, lower stability, and more interspecific antagonism. Generalists were the primary oil degraders, while specialists acted as auxiliaries promoting degradation via production of biofilm and biosurfactant. Evolutionarily, the continuous transition from specialists to generalists insured the exclusion of generalist at a relatively constant level for ecological trade-offs. Collectively, the findings emphasize the importance of specialists in facilitating oil degradation by elucidating their vital roles in maintaining system stability and regulating microbial diversity during process, and offer valuable guidance for designing remediation plans.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  Bioresource Technology

• Publication date

  2024-09-17

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.biortech.2024.131498PMID 39299343
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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