Organohalide-respiring bacteria in polluted urban rivers employ novel bifunctional reductive dehalogenases to dechlorinate polychlorinated biphenyls and tetrachloroethene.
Polluted urban river sediments could be a sink of persistent and toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in urban areas and provide desired growth niches for organohalide-respiring bacteria (OHRB). In this study, microcosms were setup with surface sediments of nationwide polluted urban rivers in China, of which 164 cultures could dechlorinate tetrachloroethene (PCE) to dichloroethenes (DCEs) and to vinyl chloride and/or ethene. Further in vivo tests showed extensive PCB dechlorination with different pathways in 135 PCE pre-grown cultures. Take reductive dechlorination of PCB180 (2345-245-CB) for example, 121 and 14 cultures preferentially removed flanked para- and meta-chlorines respectively. Strikingly, all in vitro assays with the 135 PCE pre-grown cultures showed identical PCB dechlorination pathways with their living cultures, implying the involvement of bifunctional reductive dehalogenases (RDases) to dechlorinate both PCBs and PCE. Further 16S rRNA and RDase gene-based analyses, together with enantioselective dechlorination of chiral PCBs, suggested that Dehalococcoides and Dehalogenimonas in the 135 cultures largely employed distinctively different novel bifunctional RDases to catalyze PCB/PCE-dechlorination. Quantitative assessment of the community assembly process with Modified Stochasticity Ratio (MST) indicated three different stages in enrichment of OHRB. The second stage as the only one controlled by stochastic processes (MST>0.5) required extra attention in monitoring community successional patterns to minimize stochastic variance for enriching the PCB/PCE-dechlorinating OHRB.