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Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and archaea in wastewater treatment plant sludge and nearby coastal sediment in an industrial area in China

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Under the increasing pressure of human activities, Hangzhou Bay has become one of the most seriously polluted waters along China’s coast. Considering the excessive inorganic nitrogen detected in the bay, in this study, the impact of an effluent from a coastal industrial park on ammonia-oxidizing microorganisms (AOMs) of the receiving area was interpreted for the first time by molecular technologies. Revealed by real-time PCR, the ratio of archaeal amoA/bacterial amoA ranged from 5.68 × 10−6 to 4.79 × 10−5 in the activated sludge from two wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and 0.54–3.44 in the sediments from the effluent receiving coastal area. Analyzed by clone and pyrosequencing libraries, genus Nitrosomonas was the predominant ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), but no ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) was abundant enough for sequencing in the activated sludge from the WWTPs; genus Nitrosomonas and Nitrosopumilus were the dominant AOB and AOA, respectively, in the coastal sediments. The different abundance of AOA but similar structure of AOB between the WWTPs and nearby coastal area probably indicated an anthropogenic impact on the microbial ecology in Hangzhou Bay.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a General Project (No. 51178002) granted by the Natural Science Foundation of China. We are sincerely grateful to the Zhoushan Environmental Protection Bureau and the Zhoushan Marine Ecological Envionmental Monitoring Station, Zhejiang Province, for providing the background data of Hangzhou Bay. We also thank Zhongyuan Zheng, Jing Zhang, Zhichao Li, Chengfeng Zhang from Peking University, Cong Liu from Tsinghua University, and Yin Zhang from Shanghai Normal University for helping in the sample collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Yan Zhang, Lujun Chen & Jinping Tian

  2. College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Renhua Sun, Tianjiao Dai & Donghui Wen

  3. Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Water Science and Technology, Department of Environmental Technology and Ecology, Yangtze Delta Region Institute of Tsinghua University, Zhejiang, Jiaxing, 314050, China

    Lujun Chen

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2 W2, Canada

    Yan Zhang

  5. Rural Energy and Environment Agency, Ministry of Agriculture, Beijing, 100125, China

    Renhua Sun

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  1. Yan Zhang
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  2. Lujun Chen
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  3. Renhua Sun
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  4. Tianjiao Dai
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  5. Jinping Tian
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Correspondence to Donghui Wen.

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Zhang, Y., Chen, L., Sun, R. et al. Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and archaea in wastewater treatment plant sludge and nearby coastal sediment in an industrial area in China. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 99, 4495–4507 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-6352-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-6352-9

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