Recently, the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IARRP), in collaboration with the Institute of Plant Nutrition, Resources and Environment of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (BAAFS), published a research article in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The study systematically revealed the mechanism by which glucose drives a synthetic consortium derived from black soil to efficiently cometabolize mixed herbicides, providing new theoretical insights and technical support for the bioremediation of compound agricultural pollution.

The black soil region of Northeast China is an important grain production base. Long-term application of herbicides such as atrazine, nicosulfuron, and mesotrione can lead to the accumulation of compound soil pollution. To address the complexity of natural microbial communities and the limited degradation capacity of single strains, the research team used a black soil microbial community as the study object and established a research framework integrating multi-omics analysis, machine-learning prediction, and synthetic biology validation. The results showed that glucose not only activates central carbon metabolism, including glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle, to provide energy and reducing power for microbial cometabolism, but also promotes microbial acid production, thereby creating an acidic microenvironment that works synergistically with enzymatic reactions to enhance the degradation efficiency of mixed herbicides.

In further analyses, the team combined random forest algorithms with co-occurrence network analysis to identify 27 core ASVs from the complex soil microbial community. They also reconstructed the complete genome of the key degrader Paraburkholderia through metagenomic assembly and annotated herbicide degradation-related functional genes such as atzE, P450, and gst. Based on these findings, the team constructed a synthetic consortium composed of four functional strains and revealed the differentiated division of labor in cometabolic degradation of different herbicides within the consortium system.

This study systematically elucidated the key mechanisms underlying the bioremediation of mixed herbicide contamination in black soil, from microbial community regulation and identification of key functional strains to the construction of synthetic consortia. It provides candidate microbial resources and technical reserves for the remediation of compound pollution in farmlands of the black soil region of Northeast China, the maintenance of black soil health, and the green development of agriculture.

Ma Qingyun, assistant researcher at the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences and a 2021 master's graduate of IARRP, is the first author. Researcher Ruan Zhiyong of IARRP and Associate Researcher Liu Jianbin of the BAAFS are the co-corresponding authors. Researcher Yang Jianjun of IARRP and Dr. M.J. López of the University of Almería, Spain, also participated in this study. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Innovation Capacity Building Program of the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, and the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.