Mesocosm experiment addressing microbial community response in intertidal Gulf sediments

In this study, the specialization-disturbance hypothesis was tested on beach sands, disturbed by Deep Water Horizon (DWH) crude oil, ex situ in closed laboratory advective-flow chambers that mimic in situ conditions in saturated beach sediments. The chambers were inoculated with weathered DWH oil; unamended chambers served as controls. The time series of shotgun metagenomic and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequence data from a two-month long incubation showed that functional diversity significantly increased while taxonomic diversity significantly declined, indicating a decrease in specialist taxa. Thus, results from this laboratory study corroborate field observations, providing verification that the specialization-disturbance hypothesis can explain microbial succession patterns in crude oil impacted beach sands.