Synergistic PAHs biodegradation by a mixed bacterial community: Based on a multisubstrate enrichment approach

Abstract

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are highly hard-biodegradable compounds. Therefore, in this work, a multisubstrate enrichment approach was proposed to develop a bacterial community named MBF from activated sludge of coking wastewater plant capable of degrading mixed-PAHs consisting of phenanthrene and pyrene (50 mg/L of each) by 98.8% and 73.3% within 5 days, respectively. The bacterial community could maintain its degradation ability to mixed PAHs relatively under temperatures (20°C–35°C), pH values (5.0–9.0), and salinities (0–10 g/L NaCl). Additionally, the bacterial community MBF degraded 58.9%, 79.9%, and 80.7% of mixed PAHs in the presence of catechol, salicylic acid, and phthalic acid, respectively within 5 days. High-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicon analysis showed that the bacterial community MBF was dominated by Pseudomonas in most treatments, and Burkholderia was predominant under both acidic condition and high salt concentrations. Furthermore, the composition of microbial communities of the bacterial community was significantly different with/without addition of pathway intermediate metabolites after biodegradation of mixed PAHs, revealing the metabolic burden may be distributed between members of this bacterial community. Those results demonstrate that the biodegradation ability of MBF could be maintained with the bacterial community structure altering when facing environmental variations or changes in composition of target contaminants.