Eleven acid mine drainage (AMD) samples were obtained from southeast of China for the analysis of the microbial communities diversity, and the relationship with geochemical variables and spatial distance by using a culture-independent 16S rDNA gene phylogenetic analysis approach and multivariate analysis respectively. The principle component analysis (PCA) of geochemical variables shows that eleven AMDs can be clustered into two groups, relative high and low metal rich (RHMR and RLMR) AMDs. Total 1 691 clone sequences are obtained and the detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) shows that, γ-Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Cyanobacteria, Firmicutes and Nitrospirae are dominant species in RHMR AMDs. In contrast, α-Proteobacteria, β-Proteobacteria, Planctomycetes and Bacteriodetes are dominant species in RLMR AMD. Results also show that high-abundance putative iron-oxidizing and only putative sulfur-oxidizing microorganisms are found in RHMR AMD. Multivariate analysis shows that both geochemical variables (r=0.429 3, P=0.037 7) and spatial distance (r=0.321 3, P=0.018 1) are significantly positively correlated with microbial community and pH, Mg, Fe, S, Cu and Ca are key geochemistry factors in shaping microbial community. Variance partitioning analysis shows that geochemical variables and spatial distance can explain most (92%) of the variation.
Biological desilication process is an effective way to remove silicate from rutile so that high purity rutile could be obtained. However, little is known about the molecular mechanism of this process. In this work, a newly developed rutile bio-desilication reactor was applied to enrich rutile from rough rutile concentrate obtained from Nanzhao rutile mine and a comprehensive high through-put functional gene array(Geo Chip 4.0) was used to analyze the functional gene diversity, structure and metabolic potential of microbial communities in the biological desilication reactor. The results show that TiO2 grade of the rutile concentrate could increase from 78.21% to above 90% and the recovery rate could reach to 96% or more in 8-12 d. The results also show that almost all the key functional genes involved in the geochemical cycling process, totally 4324 and 4983 functional microorganism genes, are detected in the liquid and ore surface, respectively. There are totally 712 and 831 functional genes involved in nitrogen cycling for liquid and ore surface samples, respectively. The relative abundance of functional genes involved in the phosphorus and sulfur cycling is higher in the ore surface than liquid. These results indicate that nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur cycling are also present in the desiliconization process of rutile. Acetogenesis genes are detected in the liquid and ore surface, which indicates that the desiliconizing process mainly depends on the function of acetic acid and other organic acids. Four silicon transporting genes are also detected in the sample, which proves that the bacteria have the potential to transfer silicon in the molecule level. It is shown that bio-desilication is an effective and environmental-friendly way for enrichment of rough rutile concentrate and presents an overview of functional diversity and structure of desilication microbial communities, which also provides insights into our understanding of metabolic potential in biological desilication reactor ecosystems.
