Abstract
The unregulated dismantling and improper disposal of electronic waste lead to severe soil contamination by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Constructed wetlands (CWs) play an important role in PCBs removal as a result of the co-existence of anaerobic and aerobic conditions. However, the effects and mechanisms of different PCBs concentrations in soils on plant uptake and PCBs degradation within CWs are unclear. We evaluated the uptake and degradation of PCBs at different concentrations by Myriophyllum aquaticum (Vell.) Verdc. Planting significantly increased PCBs removal by 8.70% (p < 0.05) in soils with 1500 and 2500 μg/kg PCBs, whereas no significant effect was observed at 500 and 1000 μg/kg. PCBs levels did not significantly affect plant growth and PCBs accumulation. The contribution of plant uptake to PCBs removal was only 0.10–0.12%, indicating that microbial degradation was the dominant pathway for PCBs removal after planting with M. aquaticum. In the treatments with PCBs ≥ 1500 μg/kg, M. aquaticum increased the microbial population, altered the microbial community structure and enriched PCB-degrading bacteria. Functional prediction revealed that microbes in M. aquaticum rhizosphere secreted more peroxidase and glycosyltransferase than non-plant control, which were likely involved in PCBs metabolism.
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Data availability
The microbial data in this study is available in NCBI (SRP395607).
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 32061133003 and 42107276), Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2023368), the cooperation between China and the EU through the EiCLaR project (European Union’s Horizon 2020, No. 965945) and Guangzhou Science and Technology Plan Project (202201010413).
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Shuang Wang: conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualisation, writing—original draft and writing—review and editing. Longfei Jiang: data curation, formal analysis, methodology, software and writing—review and editing. Jibing Li: methodology, software and formal analysis. **anghui Chen: methodology. Chunling Luo: conceptualisation, funding acquisition, supervision and writing—review and editing. Gan Zhang: resource.
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Wang, S., Jiang, L., Li, J. et al. The uptake and degradation of polychlorinated biphenyls in constructed wetlands planted with Myriophyllum aquaticum. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 17115–17123 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32138-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32138-y