Bacterial Communities in Concrete Reflect Its Composite Nature and Change with Weathering

Concrete is an extreme but common environment and is home to microbial communities adapted to alkaline, saline, and oligotrophic conditions. Microbes inside the concrete that makes up buildings or roads have received little attention despite their ubiquity and capacity to interact with the concrete. Because concrete is a composite of materials which have their own microbial communities, we hypothesized that the microbial communities of concrete reflect those of the concrete components and that these communities change as the concrete ages. Here, we used a 16S amplicon study to show how microbial communities change over 2 years of outdoor weathering in two sets of concrete cylinders, one prone to the concrete-degrading alkali-silica reaction (ASR) and the other having the risk of the ASR mitigated. After identifying and removing taxa that were likely laboratory or reagent contaminants, we found that precursor materials, particularly the large aggregate (gravel), were the probable source of ∼50 to 60% of the bacteria observed in the first cylinders from each series. Overall, community diversity decreased over 2 years, with temporarily increased diversity in warmer summer months. We found that most of the concrete microbiome was composed of Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria, although community composition changed seasonally and over multiyear time scales and was likely influenced by environmental deposition. Although the community composition between the two series was not significantly different overall, several taxa, including Arcobacter, Modestobacter, Salinicoccus, Rheinheimera, Lawsonella, and Bryobacter, appear to be associated with ASR. IMPORTANCE Concrete is the most-used building material in the world and a biologically extreme environment, with a microbiome composed of bacteria that likely come from concrete precursor materials, aerosols, and environmental deposition. These microbes, though seeded from a variety of materials, are all subject to desiccation, heating, starvation, high salinity, and very high pH. Microbes that survive and even thrive under these conditions can potentially either degrade concrete or contribute to its repair. Thus, understanding which microbes survive in concrete, under what conditions, and for how long has potential implications for biorepair of concrete. Further, methodological pipelines for analyzing concrete microbial communities can be applied to concrete from a variety of structures or with different types of damage to identify bioindicator species that can be used for structural health monitoring and service life prediction.