Multi-omics analysis reveals niche and fitness differences in typical denitrification microbial aggregations.

Multi-omics analysis reveals niche and fitness differences in typical denitrification microbial aggregations. Environ Int. 2019 Aug 12;132:105085 Authors: Deng Y, Ruan Y, Ma B, Timmons MB, Lu H, Xu X, Zhao H, Yin X Abstract Suspended floc and fixed biofilm are two commonly applied strategies for heterotrophic denitrification in wastewater treatment. These two strategies use different carbon sources and reside within different ecological niches for microbial aggregation, which were hypothesized to show distinct microbial structures and metabolic fitness. We surveyed three floc reactors and three biofilm reactors for denitrification and determined if there were distinct microbial aggregations. Multiple molecular omics approaches were used to determine the microbial community composition, co-occurrence network and metabolic pathways. Proteobacteria was the dominating and most active phylum among all samples. Carbon source played an important role in shaping the microbial community composition while the distribution of functional protein was largely influenced by salinity. We found that the topological network features had different ecological patterns and that the microorganisms in the biofilm reactors had more nodes but less interactions than those in floc reactors. The large niche differences in the biofilm reactors explained the observed high microbial diversity, functional redundancy and resulting high system stability. We also obse...
Source: Environment International - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Int Source Type: research