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Comparison of microbial community shifts in two parallel multi-step drinking water treatment processes

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Drinking water treatment processes remove undesirable chemicals and microorganisms from source water, which is vital to public health protection. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of treatment processes and configuration on the microbiome by comparing microbial community shifts in two series of different treatment processes operated in parallel within a full-scale drinking water treatment plant (DWTP) in Southeast China. Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes of water samples demonstrated little effect of coagulation/sedimentation and pre-oxidation steps on bacterial communities, in contrast to dramatic and concurrent microbial community shifts during ozonation, granular activated carbon treatment, sand filtration, and disinfection for both series. A large number of unique operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at these four treatment steps further illustrated their strong shaping power towards the drinking water microbial communities. Interestingly, multidimensional scaling analysis revealed tight clustering of biofilm samples collected from different treatment steps, with Nitrospira, the nitrite-oxidizing bacteria, noted at higher relative abundances in biofilm compared to water samples. Overall, this study provides a snapshot of step-to-step microbial evolvement in multi-step drinking water treatment systems, and the results provide insight to control and manipulation of the drinking water microbiome via optimization of DWTP design and operation.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51508397), Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd. (K2015K039), and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China (2016-K4-018). The authors would like to thank Yanjun Ma at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for helping with the manuscript review. The views presented here do not represent those of the sponsors.

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  1. Jiajiong Xu and Wei Tang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Municipal and Environmental Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Jiajiong Xu & Jun Ma

  2. Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) CO., LTD, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Jiajiong Xu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Wei Tang & Hong Wang

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  1. Jiajiong Xu
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Correspondence to Hong Wang.

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Xu, J., Tang, W., Ma, J. et al. Comparison of microbial community shifts in two parallel multi-step drinking water treatment processes. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 101, 5531–5541 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-017-8258-9

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