Bioaugmentation and its application in wastewater treatment: A review

Abstract

Bioaugmentation (the process of adding selected strains/mixed cultures to wastewater reactors to improve the catabolism of specific compounds, e.g. refractory organics, or overall COD) is a promising technique to solve practical problems in wastewater treatment plants, and enhance removal efficiency. The potential of this option can now be enhanced in order to take advantage of important advances in the fields of microbial ecology, molecular biology, immobilization techniques and advanced bioreactor design. Reports on bioaugmentation in WWT show the difficulties in evaluating the potential parameters involved, leading frequently to inconclusive outcomes. Many studies have been carried out on the basis of trial-and-error approaches, and it has been reported that reactors bioaugmented with pure cultures often fail to perform as well as the pure cultures under laboratory conditions. As an interesting technical challenge, the feasibility of bioaugmentation should ultimately be assessed by data from field implementation, and this review highlights several promising areas to explore in the future.

Treatment of groundwater containing Mn(II), Fe(II), As(III) and Sb(III) by bioaugmented quartz-sand filters

“…Bioaugmentation has been studied and applied intensively in wastewater (Guo et al, 2010;Zhu et al, 2015), soil (Kuppusamy et al, 2016;Tribedi and Sil, 2013), and sediment (Ahn et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2015) treatment to solve practical problems (e.g., improve catabolism of refractory organics) and enhance removal efficiency (Herrero and Stuckey, 2015). It is seldom used in drinking water treatment, however, due to lower nutrient influent, backwash, and undefined microbial roles in the treatment system.…”

“…In such cases, the reactor may need a greater biomass concentration in the winter period than that in the summer period (Herrero and Stuckey, 2015). In addition, although the inoculant in our experiment survived in the column over the entire experimental period, previous studies also have shown a significant increase in bioreactor performance soon after bioaugmentation, with the positive effects only maintained for a short time after inoculation (Boon et al, 2000;Christian et al, 2015;Herrero and Stuckey, 2015). Hence, adding inoculants at regular intervals might be needed in actual treatment.…”

Advanced nutrient removal from surface water by a consortium of attached microalgae and bacteria: A review

“…However, most of the currently studied attached microalgae-bacteria consortia form via natural colonization, which may bring undesired microbial species (Adey et al, 2013;Shangguan et al, 2015). In recent decades, the rapid development in genetic engineering has greatly helped to identify and select the functional genes and strains for nutrient transform (Herrero and Stuckey, 2015;van Kessel et al, 2015;Courtens et al, 2016). Genetic and metabolic engineering offer the possibility for strain improvement (Lindemann et al, 2016) and synthetic biology provides innovative approaches for designing microorganisms or communities with superior catalytic abilities on recalcitrant pollutants, but with potential risks to the ecological safety (Karig, 2017).…”

“…Microorganisms for bioaugmentation should be competitive and compatible with the indigenous communities (Yu and Mohn, 2002). Thus, priority should be initially given to the selection and improvement of the local microbial species for a stable consortium community, since they are usually adaptive to the conditions of the target surface water (Herrero and Stuckey, 2015).…”

“…Bioaugmentation means the addition of certain microorganisms to a community to ''reinforce" their functionalities and can be used to tailor the biocatalytic potential of attached microalgae-bacteria consortium (Herrero and Stuckey, 2015). Microorganisms for bioaugmentation should be competitive and compatible with the indigenous communities (Yu and Mohn, 2002).…”