Metagenomic analysis of a mega-city river network reveals microbial compositional heterogeneity among urban and peri-urban river stretch

TitleMetagenomic analysis of a mega-city river network reveals microbial compositional heterogeneity among urban and peri-urban river stretch
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsYadav, R, Rajput, V, Dharne, M
JournalScience of the Total Environment
Volume783
Pagination146960
Date PublishedAUG
Type of ArticleArticle
ISSN0048-9697
KeywordsIndustrialisation, Peri-urban, Riverine system, Urbanisation, Virulence factors
Abstract

The rivers in the megacities face a constant inflow of extremely polluted wastewaters from various sources, and their influence on the connected peri-urban river is still poorly understood. The riverine system in Pune consists of Rivers Mula, Ramnadi, Pawana, Mutha, and Mula-Mutha, traversing through the urban settlements of Pune before joining River Bhima in the peri-urban region. We used MinION-based metagenomic sequencing to generate a comprehensive understanding of the microbial diversity differ-ences between the urban and peri-urban zones, which has not been explored at the meta scale until date. The taxonomic analysis revealed significant enrichment of pollution indicators microbial taxa (Welsch's t-test, p < 0.05, Benjamini-Hochberg FDR test) such as Bacteriodetes, Firmicutes, Spirochaetes, Synergistetes, Euryarcheota in the urban waters as compared to peri-urban waters. Further, the peri-urban waters showed a significantly higher prevalence of ammonium oxidising archaeal groups such as Nitrososphaeraceae (Student's t-test p-value <0.05 with FDR correction), thereby probably suggesting the influence of agricultural runoffs. Besides, the microbial community diversity assessment also indicated the significant dissimilarity in the microbial community of urban and peri-urban waters. Overall, the analysis predicted 295 virulence genes mapping to 38 different path-ogenic bacteria in the riverine system. Moreover, the higher genome coverage (at least 60%) for priority patho-gens such as Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, Acinetobacter, Escherichia, Aeromonas in the sediment metagenome consolidates their dominance in this riverine system. To conclude, our investigation showed that the unre-strained anthropogenic and related activities could potentially contribute to the overall dismal conditions and in-fluence the connected riverine stretches on the outskirts of the city . (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

DOI10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.146960
Type of Journal (Indian or Foreign)

Foreign

Impact Factor (IF)7.963
Divison category: 
Biochemical Sciences

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