Microbe-mediated remediation becomes a desire method for removal of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) due to its eco-friendly and sustainable nature. The improvement of practical feasibility requires constructing comprehensive species pool, while it is still limited by the rapid recognition of potential bacterial resources from environment. Here, based on the relative abundances of bacterial OTUs and pollutant concentrations, we established indexes to assess their tolerance to organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and flame retardants (FRs) that are atmospheric transported and naturally accumulated in forest soil via forest filter effect. By exploring the tolerance pattern from tropical to temperate forests across China, we demonstrated that diversity, community composition, and relative abundances of POP-tolerant bacteria were significantly related to POPs' distribution and concentration. By recognizing over a hundred of genera composed of POP-tolerant species, we found that OCP-tolerant taxa were wide-distributed, while bacterial communities were more responsive to the contamination level of FRs and FR-tolerant taxa were accumulated along the increase of FRs pollution. Our indexes successfully recognized well-known POPs-degrading genera, including Rhodococcus, Bacillus, Arthrobacter, Stenotrophomonas, and Pseudomonas, as well as a series of versatile taxa affiliated with families Ktedonobacteraceae, Acetobacteraceae, Solirubrobacteraceae, and Nocardiaceae, which were extremely rare and likely ignored in laboratory-scale experiments. Together, our findings provide valuable clues to expand the library of POPs-degrading candidates that is helpful in screening bacterial resources for bioremediation.
Keywords: Bacterial tolerance; Bioremediation; Flame retardants (FRs); Forest soil; Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs).
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