Effect of Sewage and Industrial Effluents on Bacterial and Archaeal Communities of Creek Sediments in the Taihu Basin

Abstract

Different characteristics of wastewater have different effects on the diversity and abundance of bacteria and archaea in rivers. There are many creeks around Taihu Lake, and they receive a large volume of industrial wastewater and domestic sewage, which is discharged into these creeks, and finally into Taihu Lake. The present study determined Illumina reads (16S rRNA gene amplicons) to analyze the effects of industrial wastewater and domestic sewage on the bacterial and archaeal communities at the different sampling sites along two creeks. The bacterial and archaeal diversity of the creek receiving sewage was higher than that of the creek receiving industrial waste. Proteobacteria dominated the microbial communities of all samples in both creeks. Betaproteobacteria dominated in the sewage creek, and its abundance declined along the creek. Certain pollutant-resistant classes were more abundant at the site near to the pollution source of the industry creek (e.g., Epsilonproteobacteria and Flavobacteria). Halobacteria belonging to the phylum Euryarchaeota was the dominant archaea at all sites in both creeks, while Methanobacteria was more abundant in the industry creek. The bacterial community was more affected by the distance between the sampling site and the pollutant source than the archaeal community, indicating that bacterial diversity and abundance could be a good index to distinguish domestic and industrial pollution, especially when the main pollution sources are difficult to identify.

An integrated insight into the response of bacterial communities to anthropogenic contaminants in a river: A case study of the Wonderfonteinspruit catchment area, South Africa

“…Also, previous studies have demonstrated that increased concentrations of organic and inorganic nutrients can stimulate bacterial growth resulting in higher bacterial diversity and community composition [49, 50]. However, our results do not support these findings, but comply with similar studies that demonstrated lower bacterial in heavily contaminated freshwater systems [44, 46, 51]. The lower bacterial diversity could be explained by the high abundance of generalists accompanied by the loss of the most sensitive species.…”

Molecular Detection and Distribution of Six Medically Important Vibrio spp. in Selected Freshwater and Brackish Water Resources in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa

“…This observation could be as a result of the type of industrial effluent and other pollutants that are usually discharged into the water environments around the brackish water sampling sites ( Adeniji et al, 2017a , b ). Industrial waste has been reported to modulate the microbial biodiversity of the aquatic ecosystem ( Li et al, 2017 ; Jordaan et al, 2019 ), and this could be on a downward trend for microbial populations when such waste is toxic rather than nutrient-rich. Vibrio spp.…”

Cultivatable bacterial community in water from Lai Nullah contaminated with household sewage and industrial waste is more diverse and populated compared with nonpolluted water

“…Their occurrence indicates water contamination as in the case of Lai Nullah. Some of the bacterial species such as Bacillus, Citrobacter, Acinetobacter, Klebsiella and E. coli have been previously isolated from industrial and household sewage water (Silva-Bedoya et al 2016;Li et al 2017).…”