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Impacts of co-exposure to nanoplastics and ofloxacin on marine planktonic microbial communities and DMSP dynamics
Summary
Researchers conducted a 19-day experiment examining how nanoplastics and the antibiotic ofloxacin, alone and in combination, affect marine microbial communities and sulfur cycling in coastal seawater. Combined exposure produced significantly stronger negative effects than either pollutant alone, reducing microbial biomass, simplifying community networks, and disrupting the cycling of DMSP, a compound important for marine food webs and climate regulation.
Dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) is a key organic sulfur compound in marine food webs and the main precursor of the climate-active gas dimethyl sulfide (DMS), yet its water-column cycling under the joint influence of emerging pollutants remains poorly constrained. A 19-day microcosm experiment was conducted to examine the long-term effects of single and combined exposure to nanoplastics (NPs) and the antibiotic ofloxacin on planktonic microbial communities and DMSP cycling in coastal seawater. Combined exposure induced much stronger inhibitory effects than either single pollutant, markedly weakening the late-phase biomass recovery observed under the antibiotic-only treatment. DMSP dynamics exhibited a biphasic disruption pattern: an initial transient accumulation was followed by persistently low concentrations later in the experiment, coinciding with pronounced declines in microeukaryotic and total biomass. Combined metagenomic and flow cytometric analyses revealed a "functional decoupling" scenario, in which the surviving community displayed elevated relative abundances of DMSP biosynthesis- and degradation-related genes, while the sharp reduction in microeukaryotic biomass and overall community size constrained the maintenance and renewal of the water-column DMSP pool. Co-occurrence network analysis further showed that co-exposure simplified the microbial network from a more distributed, complex structure to a highly centralized one, with fewer nodes and keystone taxa and decreased robustness indices along the pollution gradient. Together, these findings indicate that the co-occurrence of nanoplastics and antibiotics can disturb DMSP-related functions by eroding community structural stability and functional redundancy, providing experimental evidence for the vulnerability of coastal DMSP cycling to mixed-pollutant stress.
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