“…In addition, those studies focused on investigating bacterial communities, yielded contradictory results about the effect of phosphate on these microorganisms. On the one hand, several researchers found that phosphate favoured bacterial growth (Miettinen et al, 1997;Sathasivan et al, 1997), increased bacterial cell numbers (Kasahara et al, 2004;Fang et al, 2010), promoted biofilm viability (Rubulis and Juhna, 2007) and increased Gram-negative bacterial content (Kasahara et al, 2004) and diversity (Jang et al, 2012;Payne et al, 2016). On the other hand, other researchers indicated that phosphate did not affect bacterial density (Berger et al, 1992;Gouider et al, 2009) and a decrease of bacteria was observed when this chemical was added (Appenzeller et al, 2001).…”