Can moderate heavy metal soil contaminations due to cement production influence the surrounding soil bacterial communities?

Events of soil contamination by heavy metals are mostly related to human activities that release these metals into the environment as emissions or effluents. Among the industrial activities related to heavy metal pollution, cement production plants are considered one of the most common sources. In this work we applied the High-throughput sequencing approach called 16 S rDNA metabarcoding to perform the taxonomic characterization of the prokaryotic communities of the soil surrounding three cement plants as well as two areas outside the influence of the cement plants that represented agricultural production environments free of heavy metal contamination (control areas).