Identity
- Canonical name: uranium. 1
- Known aliases: None reported in the source document. 1
- Stable external identifier: None reported in the source document. 1
Evidence from Lab–Field Ecology
The Lab Fitness Predicts Field Ecology at Oak Ridge study used uranium concentration as a geochemical gradient across 108 oak-ridge-field-research-center groundwater sites and compared it with community composition measured by 16s-amplicon-sequencing and laboratory metal-tolerance scores from kescience-fitnessbrowser. 1
Five of 11 tested genera had significant uranium associations after Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery-rate correction: herbaspirillum increased with uranium (Spearman rho=+0.336, p=3.8e-4, FDR q=0.001); bacteroides increased (rho=+0.264, p=0.006, q=0.013); caulobacter vibrioides decreased (rho=-0.411, p=1.0e-5, q=1.1e-4); sphingomonas decreased (rho=-0.382, p=4.5e-5, q=2.5e-4); and pedobacter decreased (rho=-0.266, p=0.005, q=0.013). 1
azospirillum-brasilense showed a marginal positive association with uranium (rho=+0.20, p=0.042, q=0.077). desulfovibrio-vulgaris-hildenborough showed no correlation (rho=0.022, p=0.82), and pseudomonas-fluorescens showed no correlation (rho=-0.059, p=0.55). 1
The correlation between laboratory-derived metal-tolerance score and the high-uranium/low-uranium field abundance ratio was positive but not statistically significant (Spearman rho=0.503, p=0.095, n=12 genera). 1
The report therefore treats the aggregate tolerance relationship as suggestive rather than supported, while finding that uranium-associated genus-level responses were bidirectional. 1
Sites divided at the median uranium concentration had distinct community compositions, including changes in top genera and greater prominence of rare-biosphere taxa and subsurface specialists at high-uranium sites. 1
The report interprets these patterns as broader ecological restructuring rather than a simple increase in metal-tolerant organisms, because redox conditions and carbon and energy sources also vary among sites. 1
Cross-Species Fitness Atlas
The Pan-Bacterial Metal Fitness Atlas atlas found 178 uranium-associated metal-important gene records, with a core fraction of 0.685 versus the atlas baseline, a core-fraction delta of +0.035, OR=1.18, and p=3.4e-01. 2
This refines the field result: the atlas does not establish a strong uranium-specific core-genome enrichment, while the field study likewise found a suggestive but non-significant aggregate tolerance relationship. Uranium had limited coverage—one or two organisms—so the atlas result is not directly comparable to the 108-site ecological gradient. 2
The Metal-Specific vs General Stress Genes analysis classified 88 of 181 uranium-associated metal-important gene records (48.6%) as metal-specific, meaning they showed significant metal-stress defects but a sick rate below 5% across non-metal experiments. 3
This supports the distinction between uranium-associated determinants and broadly pleiotropic stress genes, but refines the atlas interpretation: nearly half of the classified records were condition-specific even though the aggregate uranium core-enrichment signal was weak. The fraction remains subject to the study’s locusId attrition and threshold limitations. 3
Interpretation and Next Analyses
The uranium results connect to environment-embedding-geography, because field abundance reflects a multidimensional geochemical and historical environment rather than uranium exposure alone. 1
They also inform condition-specific-fitness: the non-significant aggregate metal-tolerance result motivates testing uranium-specific fitness scores matched to site concentrations. 1
The distinction between uranium-specific and general-stress defects further connects to metal-cross-resistance, with the 48.6% uranium-specific fraction providing evidence that uranium responses are neither wholly general nor wholly metal-specific. 3
The Oak Ridge setting connects uranium contamination with the environmental-resistome and with proposed analyses of metal-specific tolerance. 1
The report proposes multivariate CCA or RDA, methods for relating community composition to environmental variables while controlling for covariates, with pH, redox, and carbon sources included alongside uranium. 1
It also proposes species- or strain-level matching using ENIGMA CORAL metagenomic genome or assembly tables, temporal analysis across sampling dates, and addition of rhodanobacter to the Fitness Browser. 1
The atlas further recommends concentration-relative-to-MIC normalization, phylogenetic independent contrasts, and uranium-specific fitness modeling to resolve whether the weak atlas signal reflects exposure differences, limited coverage, or genuinely modest uranium-specific effects. 2