What is it about?
Microbes that can break down organic pollutants could play an important role in cleaning the waterways of highly urbanized areas. Read more from Asian Scientist Magazine at: http://www.asianscientist.com/2015/05/in-the-lab/enlisting-services-microbial-communities/
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Why is it important?
This study reports the influence of land-use and role of metals in relatively well-managed urban waterways. It also provides the scientific framework to study such ecosystems. Our findings suggest that sedimentary microbial communities are highly diverse in terms of composition as well as functions with respect to the suspended ones. Therefore, dredging the settled sediments from waterways brings down the self-cleaning potential of these ecosystems. Secondly, in relatively well-managed waterways the assembly of microbial communities is driven by metals, some of which are not regularly monitored.
Perspectives
The ecological principles of microbial communities will drive the development of next-generation soft engineering approaches to keep the waterways clean and healthy. I hope the framework to study waterways ecosystems, used here will be adopted by researchers and water managers in other parts of the world. I further hope that it will help in scaling-up the ecological understanding of microbial communities functioning from catchment scale to global scale.
Gourvendu Saxena
National University of Singapore
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ecogenomics Reveals Metals and Land-Use Pressures on Microbial Communities in the Waterways of a Megacity, Environmental Science & Technology, January 2015, American Chemical Society (ACS),
DOI: 10.1021/es504531s.
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