Abstract
Arsenic removal consecutive to biological iron oxidation and precipitation is an effective process for treating As-rich acid mine drainage (AMD). We studied the effect of hydraulic retention time (HRT)—from 74 to 456 min—in a bench-scale bioreactor exploiting such process. The treatment efficiency was monitored during 19 days, and the final mineralogy and bacterial communities of the biogenic precipitates were characterized by X-ray absorption spectroscopy and high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The percentage of Fe(II) oxidation (10–47%) and As removal (19–37%) increased with increasing HRT. Arsenic was trapped in the biogenic precipitates as As(III)-bearing schwertmannite and amorphous ferric arsenate, with a decrease of As/Fe ratio with increasing HRT. The bacterial community in the biogenic precipitate was dominated by Fe-oxidizing bacteria whatever the HRT. The proportion of Gallionella and Ferrovum genera shifted from respectively 65 and 12% at low HRT to 23 and 51% at high HRT, in relation with physicochemical changes in the treated water. aioA genes and Thiomonas genus were detected at all HRT although As(III) oxidation was not evidenced. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of the role of HRT as a driver of bacterial community structure in bioreactors exploiting microbial Fe(II) oxidation for AMD treatment.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) (IngECOST-DMA project, ANR-13-ECOT-0009), the OSU OREME (SO POLLUMINE Observatory, funded since 2009), and the Ecole Doctorale GAIA (PhD fellowship of Lidia Fernandez-Rojo, 2014-2017) for the financial support. We thank Remi Freydier for ICP-MS analysis on the AETE-ISO platform (OSU OREME, University of Montpellier). We thank Christophe Duperray, from the Montpellier RIO Imaging microscopy platform, for his kind assistance in cytometry. Mickaël Charron from BRGM is gratefully acknowledged for its technical assistance on aioA gene quantification. We also thank Luca Olivi from the XAFS beamline at the ELETTRA synchrotron (Trieste, Italy).
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Fernandez-Rojo, L., Casiot, C., Tardy, V. et al. Hydraulic retention time affects bacterial community structure in an As-rich acid mine drainage (AMD) biotreatment process. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 102, 9803–9813 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9290-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9290-0