Effect of Reactive black 5 azo dye on soil processes related to C and N cycling

Khadeeja Rehman; Tanvir Shahzad; Amna Sahar; Sabir Hussain; Faisal Mahmood; Muhammad H Siddique; Muhammad A Siddique; Muhammad I Rashid

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.26557v1

Effect of Reactive black 5 azo dye on soil processes related to C and N cycling

Khadeeja Rehman¹, Tanvir Shahzad ¹, Amna Sahar², Sabir Hussain¹, Faisal Mahmood¹, Muhammad H Siddique³, Muhammad A Siddique¹, Muhammad I Rashid⁴

1 Environmental Sciences & Engineering, Government College University, Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan

2 Department of Food Engineering, National Institute of Food Science and Technology, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan

3 Department of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Government College University, Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan

4 Department of Environmental Sciences, COMSATS Institute Of Information Technology, Vehari Campus, Vehari, Pakistan

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.26557v1

Published: 2018-02-22
Accepted: 2018-02-22

Subject Areas: Soil Science, Environmental Impacts
Keywords: Azo-dye contamination, soil respiration, Litter amendment, Soil contamination, soil microbial biomass

Copyright: © 2018 Rehman et al.
Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Rehman K, Shahzad T, Sahar A, Hussain S, Mahmood F, Siddique MH, Siddique MA, Rashid MI. 2018. Effect of Reactive black 5 azo dye on soil processes related to C and N cycling. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26557v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26557v1

Abstract

Azo dyes are one of the largest classes of synthetic dyes being used in textile industries. It has been reported that 15-50 % of these dyes find their way into wastewater that is often used for irrigation purpose in developing countries. Although the effect of azo dye contamination on soil nitrogen (N) cycling processes has been studied but there is no such study on soil carbon cycling. Therefore, we assessed the effect of azo dye contamination (Reactive Black 5, 30 mg kg^-1 dry soil), bacteria that decolorize this dye and dye + bacteria in the presence or absence of maize leaf litter on soil respiration, soil inorganic nitrogen and microbial biomass. We found that dye contamination did not induce any change in soil respiration, soil microbial biomass or soil inorganic nitrogen availability (P> 0.05). Litter evidently increased soil respiration. Our study concludes that the Reactive Black 5 azo dye (applied at low level i.e. 30 mg kg^-1 dry soil) contamination did not modify organic matter decomposition, N mineralization and microbial biomass in silty loam soil.