Microbial Community Changes in Methyl tert-Butyl Ether (MTBE)-Contaminated Soils

This study addresses two questions regarding the microbial community structure shift in MTBE-contaminated soils: Are known MTBE-degradaers/utilizers present in MTBE-contaminated soils? How is the microbial community affected by the addition of oxygen and the addition of cometabolic substrate?

A new quantitative fingerprinting method, Real-time-t-RFLP, was applied to study the effects of aeration and cosubstrate (toluene) on the microbial community structure of MTBE-contaminated soils. Real-time-t-RFLP, developed from two novel molecular methods (Real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (t-RFLP)), is capable of quantifying each ribotype in a microbial community. Results of this study showed that microbial community shifted dramatically after the addition of MTBE, oxygen, and toluene. Results indicated that there might be some known MTBE-degraders/utilizers present in the MTBE-contaminated soils. And cloning of the PCR products is needed to confirm their positive identifications in the future study.