Microbial Arsenic Methylation in Soil and Rice Rhizosphere

Methylated arsenic (As) species are a common constituent of rice grains accounting for 10–90% of the total As. Recent studies have shown that higher plants are unlikely to methylate As in vivo suggesting that As methylation is a microbial mediated process that occurs in soils prior to plant uptake. In this study, we designed primers according to the conserved essential amino acids and structural motifs of arsenite S-adenosylmethionine methyltransferase (ArsM). We report for the first time the successful amplification of the prokaryotic arsM gene in 14 tested soils with wide ranging As concentrations. The abundance and diversity of the arsM gene in the rice rhizosphere soil and roots were analyzed using the designed primers. Results showed that microbes containing arsM genes were phylogenetically diverse, as revealed by the clone library and terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis, and were branched into various phyla. Concentration of methylated As species in the soil solution ...