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Shifts in Microbial Community and Its Correlation with Degradative Efficiency in a Wastewater Treatment Plant

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Abstract

A wastewater treatment plant controls the level of pollution reaching the environment. Yet, despite being the most common aerobic route for treatment of wastewater, the activated sludge process is not utilized to its full potential. This is mainly due to the lack of knowledge base correlating the microbial community in the activated sludge to its degradative performance. In this study, the activated biomass at the treatment site was monitored for five consecutive months. Even though operational parameters were kept constant, the microbial community was observed to change after 3 months. This shift was seen to correlate with 25 % loss of degradative efficiency. Target oxygenases were monitored at two time points, and results indicated that the dominating pathway operating in the common effluent treatment plant (CETP) is the degradation of chlorinated aromatics. This study demonstrates the change in degradative efficiency in a CETP with the change in microbial community and analyzes the parameters influencing the microbial community of activated sludge.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the CSIR-NEERI network project, MESER-ESC0108, for supporting this work. The authors thank the CETP management for providing data and activated sludge samples. Part of this work was carried out at the State Key Lab of Environmental Aquatic Chemistry, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Genomics Division, National Environmental Engineering Research Institute – CSIR, Nehru Marg, Nagpur, 440020, India

    Atya Kapley, Niti B Jadeja & Hemant J Purohit

  2. State Key Lab. of Environmental Aquatic Chemistry, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. O. Box 2871, Beijing, 100085, China

    Ruyin Liu, Yu Zhang & Min Yang

Authors
  1. Atya Kapley
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  2. Ruyin Liu
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  3. Niti B Jadeja
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  4. Yu Zhang
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  5. Min Yang
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  6. Hemant J Purohit
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Atya Kapley.

Electronic Supplementary Material

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Supplementary Fig. 1

DGGE and cluster analysis of the 16S rRNA gene in activated sludge samples. Panel A depicts an unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic mean (UPGMA) tree represented in panel B, demonstrating the bacterial diversity and the relationship among the sludge samples based on the denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis pattern. (DOCX 129 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Taxonomy of bacteria isolated from the activated biomass based on partial 16S rDNA sequence data. (DOCX 18 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

GenBank accession numbers of sequences generated during taxonomic study. (DOCX 28 kb)

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Kapley, A., Liu, R., Jadeja, N.B. et al. Shifts in Microbial Community and Its Correlation with Degradative Efficiency in a Wastewater Treatment Plant. Appl Biochem Biotechnol 176, 2131–2143 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-015-1703-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-015-1703-2

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