Chemical dispersants can suppress the activity of natural oil-degrading microorganisms

“…Consequently, Thalassolituus and Oleispira (genus level) might have been present in these studies, but were possibly classified as an Oceanospirillales (order) which have been reported ubiquitous in oil degrading communities. Marinobacter appeared to be favoured by the absence of dispersant at Hibernia, which is consistent with previous findings (Kleindienst et al, ). In late microcosms, there were notable differences observed between metatranscriptomic and metagenomic profiles, with some taxa being virtually absent in metagenome data, but highly abundant in metatranscriptome data and vice versa.…”

“…400 Da) at the beginning of the experiment and significantly ( p < 0.001) decreased over time from 299 ± 20 Da at t 0 to 251 ± 9 Da after 28 days (Table S6). This is consistent with previous studies investigating oil degradation in the water phase. , Furthermore, the weighted-average molar H/C ratios decreased significantly ( p < 0.001) from 1.49 ± 0.03 to 1.32 ± 0.02, which was further represented in higher AI mod values, while the molar O/C ratios stayed constant between 0.28 and 0.29. Consequently, aromatic and polycondensed aromatic molecular formulae became relatively more enriched from 0 to 28 days, whereas the relative abundance of DOM aliphatic molecular formulae decreased (Figure S3).…”

“…Analysis of alkaline phosphatase, leucine amino-peptidase and β-glucosidase in whole water and <10 μm size fractions were statistically indistinguishable (Whitaker, personal communication), indicating that at least large eukaryotes > 10 μm are not responsible for the vast majority of activity measured. These assumptions aside, similar to other studies ( Gutierrez et al, 2013 ; Kleindienst et al, 2015b ; Yang et al, 2016a , b ), our observations showed that Alteromonadaceae , represented largely by Marinobacter , Alteromonas , and Aestuariibacter , are the most abundant bacterial order detected and also very commonly have alkaline phosphatase and leucine aminopeptidase. This indicates a potentially large contribution to overall enzyme activity from these genera to alkaline phosphatase and leucine aminopeptidase enzyme activity rates.…”