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Fungi are important contributors to the various functions of activated sludge wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs); however, the diversity and geographic characteristics of fungal populations have remained vastly unexplored. Here, quantitative polymerase chain reaction and 454 pyrosequencing were combined to investigate the abundance and diversity of the activated sludge fungal communities from 18 full-scale municipal WWTPs in China. Phylogenetic taxonomy revealed that the members of the fungal communities were assigned to 7 phyla and 195 genera. Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were the most abundant phyla, dominated by Pluteus, Wickerhamiella, and Penicillium. Twenty-three fungal genera, accounting for 50.1 % of the total reads, were shared by 18 WWTPs and constituted a core fungal community. The fungal communities presented similar community diversity but different community structures across the WWTPs. Significant distance decay relationships were observed for the dissimilarity in fungal community structure and altitudinal distance between WWTPs. Additionally, the community evenness increased from 0.25 to 0.7 as the altitude increased. Dissolved oxygen and the C/N ratio were determined to be the most dominant contributors to the variation in fungal community structure via redundancy analysis. The observed data demonstrated the diverse occurrence of fungal species and gave a marked view of fungal community characteristics based on the previously unexplored fungal communities in activated sludge WWTPs.

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To fully understand the effects of hydrodynamics on a microbial community, the roles of niche-based and neutral processes must be considered in a mathematical model. To this end, a two-dimensional model combining mechanisms of immigration, dispersal, and niche differentiation was first established to describe the effects of hydrodynamics on bacterial communities within fluvial biofilms. Deterministic factors of the model were identified via the calculation of Spearman's rank correlation coefficients between parameters of hydrodynamics and the bacterial community. It was found that turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent intensity were considered as a set of reasonable predictors of community composition, whereas flow velocity and turbulent intensity can be combined together to predict biofilm bacterial biomass. According to the modeling result, the bacterial community could get its favorable assembly condition with a flow velocity ranging from 0.041 to 0.061 m/s. However, the driving force for biofilm community assembly changed with the local hydrodynamics. Individuals reproduction within the biofilm was the main driving force with flow velocity less than 0.05 m/s, while cell migration played a much more important role with velocity larger than 0.05 m/s. The developed model could be considered as a useful tool for improving the technologies of water environment protection and remediation.

To understand the interaction between bacterial community assembly and the assembly linked antibiotics biodegradation, a unique model framework containing a Monod kinetic, a logistic kinetic, and a stochastic item was established to describe the biodegradation of bacterial community assembly linked sulfamethoxazole (SMX) in river sediment. According to the modeling results, both deterministic and stochastic processes driving bacterial population variations played important roles in controlling SMX biodegradation, and the relative importance depended on the in situ concentration of SMX. A threshold concentration of SMX, which was biodegraded in the experimental river sediment depending on different processes, was obtained (i.e., 20 μg/kg). The higher introduced concentration of SMX (>20 μg/kg) was found to promote the acclimation of antibiotic degradation bacteria in microbial community through niche differentiation, which resulted in the specific microbial metabolization of SMX. In contrast, the lower introduced concentration of SMX (<20 μg/kg) was not able to lead to a significant increase of deterministic processes and resulted in the biodegradation of SMX through co-metabolism by the coexisting microorganisms. The developed model can be considered a useful tool for improving the technologies of water environmental protection and remediation.