Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

After the German reunification the Wismut GmbH, formerly the 3rd largest U producer of the world, started to remediate the legacies of their U mining activities. As part of the remediation strategy the pit body was flooded to induce reductive processes. Although flooding of the mines Pöhla and Schlema-Alberoda was already finished about ten years ago, the mine water still contains elevated concentrations of toxic metals such as U, As and Ra. Thus, expensive and long-lasting monitoring and waste water treatment is required. Since microorganisms can influence the toxicity of metals directly or indirectly, one alternative approach is to use them for bioremediation. Here, the diversity of the indigenous microbial community of the mine water from Pöhla and Schlema-Alberoda is reported. Bacteria as well as Archaea were analyzed by state-of-the-art pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Mine water samples were either filtrated or harvested from a flow cell. For the filtrated Pöhla mine water, the Pöhla flow cell, the filtrated Schlema mine water, and the Schlema flow cell 485, 697, 325 and 527 sequences, respectively, were divided into 98, 189, 188 and 89 operational taxonomical units (OTUs), respectively, belonging mainly to Bacteria. The bacterial sequences from the Pöhla mine were classified into Proteobacteria, Verrumicrobia, Bacteriodetes, WS3, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Acidobacteria, SR1, Actinobacteria, Spirochaetes and OD1. For the Schlema mine Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, WS3, Bacteriodetes, Chloroflexi, SR1, Chlorobi, TM7 and Acinobacteria were found. The dominant bacterial phylum in all samples are the Proteobacteria. Higher bacterial diversities were observed in flow cells in comparison with filtrated waters. A dataset of 15786, 17872, 11404, 7780 sequences revealed 639, 643, 769 and 455 OTUs, respectively, mainly for Archaea of the filtrated Pöhla mine water, the Pöhla flow cell, the filtrated Schlema mine water and the Schlema flow cell, respectively. The archaeal sequences of the Pöhla as well as the Schlema mine water belong to the class of Methanobacteria, Thermoprotei, Methanomicrobia, Thermoplasmata and Halobacteria.