Bacterial assembly and temporal dynamics in activated sludge of a full-scale municipal wastewater treatment plant

Abstract

Understanding environmental and biological influences on the dynamics of microbial communities has received great attention in microbial ecology. Here, utilizing large time-series 16S rRNA gene data, we show that in activated sludge of an environmentally important municipal wastewater treatment plant, 5-year temporal dynamics of bacterial community shows no significant seasonal succession, but is consistent with deterministic assemblage by taxonomic relatedness. Biological interactions are dominant drivers in determining the bacterial community assembly, whereas environmental conditions (mainly sludge retention time and inorganic nitrogen) partially explain phylogenetic and quantitative variances and indirectly influence bacterial assembly. We demonstrate a correlation-based statistical method to integrate bacterial association networks with their taxonomic affiliations to predict community-wide co-occurrence and co-exclusion patterns. The results show that although taxonomically closely related bacteria tend to positively co-occur (for example, out of a cooperative relationship), negative co-excluding correlations are deterministically observed between taxonomically less related species, probably implicating roles of competition in determining bacterial assembly. Overall, disclosures of the positive and negative species-species relations will improve our understanding of ecological niches occupied by unknown species and help to predict their biological functions in ecosystems.

Shotgun Metagenomic Profiles Have a High Capacity To Discriminate Samples of Activated Sludge According to Wastewater Type

“…Ample experimental evidence has provided support for both stochastic and niche-based species-sorting processes in the assembly of bacterial communities in wastewater treatment facilities (4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9). An early quantitative survey of bacteria in industrial activated sludge from our laboratory showed that the distribution of the most abundant bacteria fitted a geometric distribution, suggesting that resource competition was a primary factor determining the assembly characteristics of those populations (10).…”

Reconstruction of metabolic networks in a fluoranthene-degrading enrichments from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon polluted soil

“…The trimmed paired-reads were merged by the PEAR program (version 0.9.5) [32] with a p-value of 0.01. On average, there were more than 30,000 raw sequences for each sample obtained for data analysis.…”

Effects of quorum quenching on temporal succession of activated sludge microbial community in a membrane bioreactor

“…Many ecological studies of full‐ and laboratory‐scale AS reactors showed that the microbial community temporally succeeds with no adverse effect on process performance (Wang et al ; Wells et al ; Valentín‐Vargas et al ; Ju and Zhang ). These results suggest that temporal change in community structure may be normal in AS reactors.…”