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Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure

Wastewater treatment plants in temperate climate zones frequently undergo seasonal nitrification failure in the winter month yet maintain removal efficiency for other contaminants. We tested the hypothesis that nitrification failure can be correlated to shifts in the nitrifying microbial community....

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Autores principales: Johnston, Juliet, LaPara, Timothy, Behrens, Sebastian
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6418219/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30872659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40872-4
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author Johnston, Juliet
LaPara, Timothy
Behrens, Sebastian
author_facet Johnston, Juliet
LaPara, Timothy
Behrens, Sebastian
author_sort Johnston, Juliet
collection PubMed
description Wastewater treatment plants in temperate climate zones frequently undergo seasonal nitrification failure in the winter month yet maintain removal efficiency for other contaminants. We tested the hypothesis that nitrification failure can be correlated to shifts in the nitrifying microbial community. We monitored three parallel, full-scale sequencing batch reactors over the course of a year with respect to reactor performance, microbial community composition via 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, and functional gene abundance using qPCR. All reactors demonstrated similar changes to their core microbiome, and only subtle variations among seasonal and transient taxa. We observed a decrease in species richness during the winter, with a slow recovery of the activated sludge community during spring. Despite the change in nitrification performance, ammonia monooxygenase gene abundances remained constant throughout the year, as did the relative sequence abundance of Nitrosomonadacae. This suggests that nitrification failure at colder temperatures might result from different reaction kinetics of nitrifying taxa, or that other organisms with strong seasonal shifts in population abundance, e.g. an uncultured lineage of Saprospiraceae, affect plant performance in the winter. This research is a comprehensive analysis of the seasonal microbial community dynamics in triplicate full-scale sequencing batch reactors and ultimately strengthens our basic understanding of the microbial ecology of activated sludge communities by revealing seasonal succession patterns of individual taxa that correlate with nutrient removal efficiency.
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spelling pubmed-64182192019-03-18 Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure Johnston, Juliet LaPara, Timothy Behrens, Sebastian Sci Rep Article Wastewater treatment plants in temperate climate zones frequently undergo seasonal nitrification failure in the winter month yet maintain removal efficiency for other contaminants. We tested the hypothesis that nitrification failure can be correlated to shifts in the nitrifying microbial community. We monitored three parallel, full-scale sequencing batch reactors over the course of a year with respect to reactor performance, microbial community composition via 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, and functional gene abundance using qPCR. All reactors demonstrated similar changes to their core microbiome, and only subtle variations among seasonal and transient taxa. We observed a decrease in species richness during the winter, with a slow recovery of the activated sludge community during spring. Despite the change in nitrification performance, ammonia monooxygenase gene abundances remained constant throughout the year, as did the relative sequence abundance of Nitrosomonadacae. This suggests that nitrification failure at colder temperatures might result from different reaction kinetics of nitrifying taxa, or that other organisms with strong seasonal shifts in population abundance, e.g. an uncultured lineage of Saprospiraceae, affect plant performance in the winter. This research is a comprehensive analysis of the seasonal microbial community dynamics in triplicate full-scale sequencing batch reactors and ultimately strengthens our basic understanding of the microbial ecology of activated sludge communities by revealing seasonal succession patterns of individual taxa that correlate with nutrient removal efficiency. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-03-14 /pmc/articles/PMC6418219/ /pubmed/30872659 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40872-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Johnston, Juliet
LaPara, Timothy
Behrens, Sebastian
Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title_full Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title_fullStr Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title_full_unstemmed Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title_short Composition and Dynamics of the Activated Sludge Microbiome during Seasonal Nitrification Failure
title_sort composition and dynamics of the activated sludge microbiome during seasonal nitrification failure
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6418219/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30872659
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40872-4
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