Project description:Seagrass meadows represent one of the highest productive marine ecosystems and are of great ecological and economic values. Recently, they have been confronted with worldwide decline. Fungi play important roles in sustaining the ecosystem health as degraders of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), but fewer studies have been conducted in seagrass ecosystems. Hence, we investigated the dynamic variations of the fungal community succession under PAH stress in rhizosphere sediment of seagrasses Enhalus acoroides in this study. Polymerase chain reaction-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE), quantitative PCR (qPCR) and a clone library have been employed to analyze the fungal community's shifts. Sequencing results of DGGE and the clone library showed that the predominant species belong to phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. The abundance of three groups decreased sharply over the incubation period, whereas they demonstrated different fungal diversity patterns. Both the exposure time and the PAH concentrations affected the microbial diversity as assessed by PCR-DGGE analysis. Redundancy analysis (RDA) indicated that significant factors driving community shifts were ammonium and pH (p < 0.05). Significant amounts of the variations (31.1%) were explained by pH and ammonium, illustrating that those two parameters were the most likely ones to influence or be influenced by the fungal communities' changes. Investigation results also indicated that fungal communities in seagrass meadow were very sensitive to PAH-induced stress and may be used as potential indicators for the PAH contamination.
Project description:Enhalus acoroides (E. acoroides) is one of the most common species in seagrass meadows. Based on the application of allelochemicals from aquatic plants to inhibit harmful algal blooms (HABs), we used E. acoroides aqueous extract against harmful algae species Phaeocystis globosa (P. globosa). The results showed that E. acoroides aqueous extract could significantly inhibited the growth of P. globosa, decrease the chlorophyll-a content and photosynthetic efficiency (Fv/Fm) values of P. globosa, followed by vacuolization, plasmolysis, and the destruction of organelles. Twelve types of major chemical constituents were identified in E. acoroides aqueous extracts by ultraperformance liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (UPLC-HRMS), including six flavonoids, two homocyclic peptides, two long-chain aliphatic amides, one tannin, and one nitrogen heterocyclic compound. Flavonoids were the characteristic chemical constituents of E. acoroides aqueous extract. Furthermore, the antialgal activity of luteolin-7-O-glucuronide (68.125 μg/mL in 8 g/L E. acoroides aqueous extract) was assessed. The EC50-96 h value was 34.29 μg/mL. In conclusion, the results revealed that luteolin 7-O-glucuronide was one of the antialgal compounds of E. acoroides aqueous extract, with potential application as novel algaecide.