Consistent responses of soil microbial taxonomic and functional attributes to mercury pollution across China

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The ecological consequences of mercury (Hg) pollution-one of the major pollutants worldwide-on microbial taxonomic and functional attributes remain poorly understood and largely unexplored. Using soils from two typical Hg-impacted regions across China, here, we evaluated the role of Hg pollution in regulating bacterial abundance, diversity, and co-occurrence network. We also investigated the associations between Hg contents and the relative abundance of microbial functional genes by analyzing the soil metagenomes from a subset of those sites. RESULTS: We found that soil Hg largely influenced the taxonomic and functional attributes of microbial communities in the two studied regio..