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Soil protists are more resilient to the combined effect of microplastics and heavy metals than bacterial communities
Summary
Researchers compared how soil protists and bacteria respond to combined exposure to microplastics and copper contamination. They found that bacterial communities were immediately affected by copper alone, while protist communities showed a delayed response that only appeared under combined pollution. The study suggests that soil protists are more resilient to mixed microplastic and heavy metal contamination than bacteria, but the combination still disrupts important ecological interactions like predation.
Heavy metals and micro-/nanoplastic pollution seriously threaten the environment and ecosystems. While many studies investigated their effects on diverse microbes, few studies have focused on soil protists, and it is unclear how soil protists respond to the combined effect of micro-/nanoplastics and heavy metals. This study investigated how soil protistan and bacterial communities respond to single or combined copper and micro-/nanoplastics. The bacterial community exhibited an instantaneous response to single copper pollution, whereas the combined pollution resulted in a hysteresis effect on the protistan community. Single and combined pollution inhibited the predation of protists and changed the construction of ecological networks. Though single and combined pollution did not significantly affect the overall community structure, the exposure experiment indicated that combined pollution harmed soil amoeba's fitness. These findings offer valuable new insights into the toxic effects of single and combined pollution of copper and plastics on soil protistan and bacterial communities. Additionally, this study shows that sequencing-based analyses cannot fully reflect pollutants' adverse effects, and both culture-independent and dependent methods are needed to reveal the impact of pollutants on soil microbes.