Conjugative dissemination of plasmids in rapid sand filters: a trojan horse strategy to enhance pesticide degradation in groundwater treatment

The supply of clean water for human consumption is being challenged by the appearance of pesticide pollutants in groundwater ecosystems. Biological rapid sand filtration is a commonly employed method for the removal of organic and inorganic impurities in water which relies on the degradative properties of microorganisms for the removal of diverse contaminants, including pesticides. Although sustainable and relatively inexpensive, the bioremediation capabilities of rapid sand filters vary greatly across waterworks. Bioaugmentation efforts with degradation-proficient bacteria have proven difficult due to the inability of the exogenous microbes to stably colonize the sand filters. Pesticide degrading genes, however, are often encoded naturally by plasmids—extrachromosomal DNA elements that can transfer between bacteria—yet their ability to spread within rapid sand filters have remained unknown. To evaluate the potential use of plasmids for the dissemination of pesticide degrading genes, we examined the permissiveness of rapid sand filter communities towards four environmental transmissible plasmids; RP4, RSF1010, pKJK5 and TOL (pWWO), using a dual-fluorescent bioreporter platform combined with FACS and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Our results reveal that plasmids can transfer at high frequencies and across distantly related taxa from rapid sand filter communities, emphasizing their suitability for introducing pesticide degrading determinants in the microbiomes of underperforming water purification plants.