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Start-up and bacterial community compositions of partial nitrification in moving bed biofilm reactor

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Partial nitrification (PN) has been considered as one of the promising processes for pretreatment of ammonium-rich wastewater. In this study, a kind of novel carriers with enhanced hydrophilicity and electrophilicity was implemented in a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) to start up PN process. Results indicated that biofilm formation rate was higher on modified carriers. In comparison with the reactor filled with traditional carriers (start-up period of 21 days), it took only 14 days to start up PN successfully with ammonia removal efficiency and nitrite accumulation rate of 90 and 91%, respectively, in the reactor filled with modified carriers. Evident changes of spatial distributions and community structures had been detected during the start-up. Free-floating cells existed in planktonic sludge, while these microorganisms trended to form flocs in the biofilm. High-throughput pyrosequencing results indicated that Nitrosomonas was the predominant ammonia-oxidizing bacterium (AOB) in the PN system, while Comamonas might also play a vital role for nitrogen oxidation. Additionally, some other bacteria such as Ferruginibacter, Ottowia, Saprospiraceae, and Rhizobacter were selected to establish stable footholds. This study would be potentially significant for better understanding the microbial features and developing efficient strategies accordingly for MBBR-based PN operation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Hong-lei Zhan from Stevens Institution of Technology for providing language help.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Industrial Ecology and Environmental Engineering (Ministry of Education), School of Environmental Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, People’s Republic of China

    Tao Liu, Yan-jun Mao, Yan-ping Shi & Xie Quan

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  1. Tao Liu
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  2. Yan-jun Mao
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  3. Yan-ping Shi
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  4. Xie Quan
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Correspondence to Tao Liu.

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Funding

This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 51408095), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant numbers 2014M561236, 2015T80257), the Foundation of Liaoning Educational Committee (grant number L2014021), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant number DUT16RC(4)13).

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The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Liu, T., Mao, Yj., Shi, Yp. et al. Start-up and bacterial community compositions of partial nitrification in moving bed biofilm reactor. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 101, 2563–2574 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-016-8003-9

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