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Contaminants in the interstitial waters are not only dissolved but also associated with a filterable colloidal phase such as DOC. The DOC plays an important role regulating the distribution of chemicals between particulate and dissolved phases since it binds chemicals and makes them unavailable for vertical diffusive exchange. A three-phase partitioning model that consists of free-dissolved, DOC-bound, particulate-bound components of the chemicals involved is used for the contaminant transport model in order to include the effect of DOC on the partition coefficient. The contaminant model is linked to WASP modeling framework to predict remobilization of PCBs in sediments and the fate and transport of the contaminant in overlying waters of the New Bedford Harbor where the harbor has been contaminated with PCBs and heavy metals released from electronic capacitor manufacturers. Simulation of remedial controls indicates that if no action is taken, PCB concentrations will continue to be at elevated levels. Several scenarios for the removal of contaminated sediments have been performed to reduce the elevated PCB concentrations to background levels.

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The functional gene of amoA, which produces the α-subunit of ammonia monooxygenase (AMO), has been analyzed to reveal the microbial community structure of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) by culture-independent methods. In this study, the distribution of the amoA gene in 10 wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) was revealed by the fingerprinting method of terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and comparative sequencing. T-RFLP showed diverse communities of AOB in the modified Ludzack-Ettinger process, in the anaerobic-anoxic-oxic processes, in the hanging biological contactor, and in the sequencing batch reactor. In all of these environments, long solid retention time (SRT) was expected to be the critical factor for maintaining the diverse AOB community structure. Because T-RFLP does not offer sufficient information to confirm the phylogenetic information of AOB, the microbial community structures were analyzed by comparative sequencing for seven samples that were selected by the statistical categorization using principal component analysis (PCA) among 14 samples. The phylogenetic tree of 21 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) among 88 clones obtained in this study revealed that AOB of Nitrosomonas oligotropha and europaea lineages were predominant in WWTPs. Double labeled T-RFLP produced group-specific terminal restriction fragments (T-RFs) representing several groups of AOB and offered advanced resolution comparing with the single labeled T-RFLP.