Figure 1.
LIgnase activity of bio-traps after one, four, and thirty weeks in the field.
These lignase assays are based on degradation of the lignin substrate analog L-dihydrophenylalanine (L-DOPA) with 0.3% hydrogen peroxide for peroxidase, and without for phenol oxidase. All assays were performed on fresh beads that had been in the ground 48 hours earlier. Enzyme activities reported as absorbance units per gram bead, and are means of six biological replicates with standard error bars shown, and with significance levels between treatments at each time point (p<0.05) are denoted by an asterisk (*).
Table 1.
Summary of statistical analyses.
Table 2.
Q-PCR of total number of bacteria from bio-traps per gram bead.
Figure 2.
Microbial community analysis of bio-traps.
Ordination is shown for (A) PhyloChip and (B) SSU rRNA pyrosequencing of microbial communities detected in lignin-amended and unamended biosep beads over time. For PhyloChip analysis there were 537 distinct bacterial taxa detected; for pyrosequencing there were 4,684 bacterial, archaeal, and eukaryotic taxa detected. In both analyses, ordination performed was nonmetric multidimensional scaling using Bray-Curtis distance measure, and mean ordination scores plus or minus standard error are shown based on four randomly chosen of the six biological replicates.
Figure 3.
Rank-abundance comparison of SSU rRNA pyrosequencing results.
A two-tailed t-test was performed to identify OTUs different between lignin-ameneded and unamended control beads. Several low-abundant members of the communities turned out to be significantly different. At T2 (4 weeks) there were no OTUs significantly different between beads. Taxa names are listed with greengenes taxon ID numbers in parentheses.
Table 3.
Taxa significantly enriched in the T1 lignin-amended beads compared to unamended beads by PhyloChip analysis.