Diversity and functional prediction of microbial communities involved in the first aerobic bioreactor of coking wastewater treatment system

PLoS One. 2020 Dec 10;15(12):e0243748. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243748. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

The pre-aerobic process of coking wastewater treatment has strong capacity of decarbonization and detoxification, which contribute to the subsequent dinitrogen of non-carbon source/heterotrophic denitrification. The COD removal rate can reach > 90% in the first aerobic bioreactor of the novel O/H/O coking wastewater treatment system during long-term operation. The physico-chemical characteristics of influent and effluent coking wastewater in the first aerobic bioreactor were analyzed to examine how they correlated with bacterial communities. The diversity of the activated sludge microbial community was investigated using a culture-independent molecular approach. The microbial community functional profiling and detailed pathways were predicted from the 16S rRNA gene-sequencing data by the PICRUSt software and the KEGG database. High-throughput MiSeq sequencing results revealed a distinct microbial composition in the activated sludge of the first aerobic bioreactor of the O/H/O system. Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Chlorobi were the decarbonization and detoxification dominant phyla with the relative abundance of 84.07 ± 5.45, 10.89 ± 6.31, and 2.96 ± 1.12%, respectively. Thiobacillus, Rhodoplanes, Lysobacter, and Leucobacter were the potential major genera involved in the crucial functional pathways related to the degradation of phenols, cyanide, benzoate, and naphthalene. These results indicated that the comprehensive understanding of the structure and function diversity of the microbial community in the bioreactor will be conducive to the optimal coking wastewater treatment.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aerobiosis
  • Bacteria / genetics
  • Bioreactors / microbiology*
  • Microbiota*
  • RNA, Ribosomal, 16S / genetics
  • Wastewater / microbiology*
  • Water Purification* / instrumentation

Substances

  • RNA, Ribosomal, 16S
  • Waste Water

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1901218), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51778238 and No. 51808297), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (No. 2019ZD21), the Program for Science and Technology of Guangdong Province, China (No. 2016A020221037, 2017A030313066, 2017A020216001 and 2018A050506009), and the innovation and university promotion project of Guangdong Pharmaceutical University (No. 2017KCXTD020). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.