Bacterial communities involved in sulfur transformations in wastewater treatment plants

Abstract

The main sulfate-reducing (SRB) and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria (SOB) in six wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) located at southern Brazil were described based on high-throughput sequencing of the 16S rDNA. Specific taxa of SRB and SOB were correlated with some abiotic factors, such as the source of the wastewater, oxygen content, sample type, and physical chemical attributes of these WWTPs. When the 22 families of SRB and SOB were clustered together, the samples presented a striking distribution, demonstrating grouping patterns according to the sample type. For SOB, the most abundant families were Spirochaetaceae, Chromatiaceae, Helicobacteriaceae, Rhodospirillaceae, and Neisseriaceae, whereas, for SRB, were Syntrophaceae, Desulfobacteraceae, Nitrospiraceae, and Desulfovibriaceae. The structure and composition of the major families related to the sulfur cycle were also influenced by six chemical attributes (sulfur, potassium, zinc, manganese, phosphorus, and nitrogen). Sulfur was the chemical attribute that most influenced the variation of bacterial communities in the WWTPs (λ = 0.14, p = 0.008). The OTUs affiliated to Syntrophus showed the highest response to the increase of total sulfur. All these findings can contribute to improve the understanding in relation to the sulfur-oxidizing and sulfate-reducing communities in WWTPs aiming to reduce HS emissions.

Induction of microbial oxidative stress as a new strategy to enhance the enzymatic degradation of organic micropollutants in wastewater

“…These families can degrade aromatic compounds and denitrify industrial wastewaters (35). Syntropahceae dominated the anaerobic conditions within the 0.16 cycles/hr perturbed DO regime, consistent with other observations (36). However, Flavobacteriaceae, Pseudomonadaceae and Sphingomonadaceae (10-14%) families evident in 0.25 and 0.5 cycles/hr perturbed cultures at low-DO regime were identified as the core bacteria in activated sludge systems with floc-formation capabilities (37) and capable of co-metabolic biotransformation of ibuprofen (38), carbamazepine and sulfamethoxazole (39, 40).…”

Microbial community structure and ecology in sediments of a pristine mangrove forest

“…The family Desulfobacteraceae has representatives that are capable of reducing iron and sulfate in the environment and are relatively abundant compared to other groups indicating that they might play an important role in these cycles in these mangrove sediments. The same environmental roles can be attributed to the family Desulfobulbaceae (Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006;Oren and Xu 2014;Meyer et al 2016 ;Reyes et al 2016) . The other families that may be involved in the iron cycle in the sediments are Flavobacteriaceae that have several genes for iron acquisition and Rhodobacteraceae with the presence of genes that encode for its transport (Delmont et al 2015) .…”

“…Another abundant group found in the samples was Clostridiaceae (12,033 sequences) which have been reported to play roles on nitrogen-fixing (Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006) and is probably participating in this cycle on the mangrove sediments. The third most abundant family in the samples was Hyphomicrobiaceae (10,104 sequences) which is also possibly participating in the nitrogen-fixing and denitrification processes and likely has a role in sulfur cycling in the sediments (Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006;Oren and Xu 2014;Meyer et al 2016) . The anaerobic oxidation of ammonium (ANAMMOX) is considered as an alternative route for N loss to the denitrification process in environments with anoxic conditions and is driven by microorganisms that belong to the order Planctomycetales including the family Planctomycetaceae (Nie et al 2015;Wang et al 2012) .…”

“…Organisms with reported capacity of performing the ammonification processes were also present, represented by the family Peptostreptococcaceae (Slobodkin 2014) Desulfarculaceae (Sun et al 2010) comprising the sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) in the samples. Chromatiaceae is an important representative of a group known as purple sulfur bacteria and is strongly correlated with the sulfur cycle in the environment and in wastewater treatment plants (Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006;Oren and Xu 2014;Meyer et al 2016 ;Hanada and Pierson 2006 ;Xia et al 2019) . Some members of the family Syntrophaceae are able to use sulfur or other sulfur compounds as electron acceptors, thus participating in the sulfur cycle in the environment (Kuever 2014) and are even capable of contributing in some steps of the methanogenesis by cooperation with methanogenic archaea (Cheng et al 2013) .…”

“…and ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) which is represented by the family Nitrososphaeraceae(Kerou et al 2016) .Some families in the sediments can be correlated to the sulfur cycle as is the case of the Rhodobacteraceae(Delmont et al 2015) . Another important family involved in the sulfur cycle was Spirochaetaceae which is reported to participate in the sulfur oxidizing process(Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006;Oren and Xu 2014;Meyer et al 2016) , while the sulfate-reducing step is possibly driven by organisms of the families Thermodesulfovibrionaceae( Bhatnagar et al 2015 ;Wiegel, Tanner, and Rainey 2006;Oren and Xu 2014;Meyer et al 2016) and…”