Insights into the key components of bacterial assemblages in typical process units of oily wastewater treatment plants

Abstract

To compare the structure of microbial community in the oily wastewater treatment plants (OWWTPs) located in China, and to discern the impacts of environment variables on the variance of microbial community, activated sludge samples from six typical OWWTPs were taken and the structure of microbial community of these six samples were analyzed via Illumina high-throughput sequencing. 18 core genera including Comamonas, Bacillus, Pseudomonas, Thauera, Paenibacillus, etc. were shared by all OWWTPs. Canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) suggested that temperature, oil concentration, DO and pH exhibited significant impacts in shaping the structure of microbial community. Variance partitioning analyses (VPA) illuminated that the most variation in microbial community was contributed to geographic location, explaining 36.4% of the total variations obtained, followed by wastewater characteristics (18.7%) and operational parameters (8.6%). This work offered insights into the structure of microbial community in OWWTPs at different geographic locations and illustrated the correlations between environment variables and microbial community in OWWTPs.

Keywords: Core microbial community; Environment variables; High-throughput sequencing; Oily wastewater treatment plants (OWWTPs).