Time-series incubations in a coastal environment illuminates the importance of early colonizers and the complexity of bacterial biofilm dynamics on marine plastics

Type Article
Date 2022-11
Language English
Author(s) Lemonnier C.1, Chalopin MorganeORCID2, Huvet ArnaudORCID2, Le Roux Frederique3, Labreuche Yannick3, 4, Petton BrunoORCID2, Maignien Lois1, Paul-Pont Ika6, Reveillaud J.5
Affiliation(s) 1 : Univ Brest (UBO), CNRS, IFREMER, Laboratoire de Microbiologie des Environnements Extrêmes, F-29280, Plouzané, France
2 : Univ Brest (UBO), CNRS, IFREMER, IRD, LEMAR, F-29280, Plouzané, France
3 : Ifremer, Unité Physiologie Fonctionnelle des Organismes Marins, ZI de La Pointe Du Diable, CS 10070, F-29280, Plouzané, France
4 : Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Paris 06, CNRS, UMR 8227, Integrative Biology of Marine Models, Station Biologique de Roscoff, CS 90074, F-29688, Roscoff Cedex, France
5 : MIVEGEC, University of Montpellier, INRAe, CNRS, IRD, Montpellier, France
6 : Univ Brest (UBO), CNRS, IFREMER, IRD, LEMAR, F-29280, Plouzané, France
Source Environmental Pollution (0269-7491) (Elsevier BV), 2022-11 , Vol. 312 , P. 119994 (11p.)
DOI 10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119994
WOS© Times Cited 4
Abstract

The problematic of microplastics pollution in the marine environment is tightly linked to their colonization by a wide diversity of microorganisms, the so-called plastisphere. The composition of the plastisphere relies on a complex combination of multiple factors including the surrounding environment, the time of incubation along with the polymer type, making it difficult to understand how the biofilm evolves during the microplastic lifetime over the oceans. To better define bacterial community assembly processes on plastics, we performed a 5 months spatio-temporal survey of the plastisphere in an oyster farming area in the Bay of Brest (France). We deployed three types of plastic pellets in two positions in the foreshore and in the water column. Plastic-associated biofilm composition in all these conditions was monitored using 16 S rRNA metabarcoding and compared to free-living and attached bacterial members of seawater. We observed that bacterial families associated to plastic pellets were significantly distinct from the ones found in seawater, with a significant prevalence of filamentous Cyanobacteria on plastics. No convergence towards a unique plastisphere was detected between polymers exposed in the intertidal and subtidal area, emphasizing the central role of the surrounding environment on constantly shaping the plastisphere community diversity. However, we could define a bulk of early-colonizers of marine biofilms such as Alteromonas, Pseudoalteromonas or Vibrio. These early-colonizers could reach high abundances in floating microplastics collected in field-sampling studies, suggesting the plastic-associated biofilms could remain at early development stages across large oceanic scales. Our study raises the hypothesis that most members of the plastisphere, including putative pathogens, could result of opportunistic colonization processes and unlikely long-term transport.

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Lemonnier C., Chalopin Morgane, Huvet Arnaud, Le Roux Frederique, Labreuche Yannick, Petton Bruno, Maignien Lois, Paul-Pont Ika, Reveillaud J. (2022). Time-series incubations in a coastal environment illuminates the importance of early colonizers and the complexity of bacterial biofilm dynamics on marine plastics. Environmental Pollution, 312, 119994 (11p.). Publisher's official version : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119994 , Open Access version : https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00789/90111/