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Nanoplastics shift arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal mediation of bacterial community assembly from diversity to compositional stability under arsenic stress.
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Scientists found that when soil is polluted with both tiny plastic particles (nanoplastics) and arsenic, a helpful soil fungus changes strategy: instead of just boosting the variety of soil bacteria, it stabilizes and reorganizes the bacterial community to keep the soil ecosystem functioning well. This matters because arsenic contamination is a serious health risk that can enter crops and drinking water, and understanding how nanoplastic pollution affects nature's own cleanup crews helps researchers protect soil health, and ultimately our food supply, as plastic pollution keeps rising.
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) play a vital role in contaminated soil remediation, yet how NPs regulate AMF mediated arsenic (As) remediation under NP and As co-contamination remains unclear. This study aims to elucidate the effects of NP on the strategic shifts in AMF in response to As exposure. This study demonstrates that NP fundamentally redirect the strategy of AMF. The result shows that AMF inoculation significantly increased community diversity under individual NP or As stress. Instead, AMF orchestrated a profound restructuring of the microbial community, notably enriching key phyla such as Proteobacteria and Bdellovibrionota, and simplifying the co-occurrence network (reduced nodes, edges, and average degree) under the co-contaminated NP and As. Crucially, this community restructuring was not a degradation but a strategic optimization. AMF significantly enhances community compositional stability (manifested as reduced vulnerability and average avriation degree, and in-creased niche width) as well as soil ecosystem multifunctionality. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) confirmed that under AMF mediation, microbial community directly governed this enhanced compositional stability. Overall, NPs shift the primary ecological function of AMF from promoting microbial diversity to enhancing community compositional stability in co contaminated soils.
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Bidirectional interference between nanoplastics and arsenic in arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis: Reciprocal modulation of uptake, transformation and translocation
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Researchers used a dual-compartment culture system to show that nanoplastics and arsenic interfere with each other inside arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, where nanoplastics reduce arsenic uptake by fungal hyphae while promoting its conversion to less toxic organic forms, and the fungi in turn internalize and translocate nanoplastics — revealing potential for fungal-based remediation of co-contaminated soils.
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Researchers studied the combined and individual effects of arsenic and micro- or nanoplastics on soil bacterial, fungal, and protistan communities. The study found that combined pollution distinctly altered the composition of these microbial communities, with protistan communities being particularly sensitive, indicating that the co-occurrence of plastics and heavy metals in soil may have compounding ecological effects.
Soil pH has a stronger effect than arsenic content on shaping plastisphere bacterial communities in soil
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Soil pH had a stronger influence than arsenic contamination on shaping the bacterial communities colonizing microplastic surfaces (plastisphere) in contaminated soils, highlighting pH as a key driver of plastisphere ecology.
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Scientists found that tiny plastic particles in soil can mess with grasslands in unpredictable ways—sometimes boosting plant diversity, sometimes hurting it, depending on the type of plastic, the soil fungi present, and how much plastic was there. This matters because grasslands help store carbon, filter water, and support food systems, so as plastic pollution keeps building up in soil, it could quietly reshape ecosystems we depend on—even though the effects aren't simple or one-size-fits-all.
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