Effect of wastewater disposal on the bacterial and archaeal community of sea sediment in an industrial area in China

Abstract

Human activities usually leave footprints in the environment. By using 454 pyrosequencing, the impact of effluent from an industrial park on the coastal microecology in Hangzhou Bay, China, was interpreted by analysing the microbial communities of the activated sludge from three wastewater treatment plants and the sediment from the effluent receiving area. Based on richness and biodiversity, the sediments were more diversified than the activated sludge, although the seawater environment was highly contaminated. Both bacterial and archaeal communities were niche-determined. The bacterial phylum Proteobacteria dominated in all samples; and certain pollutant-resistant genera, such as Thauera and Truepera, were found in all samples. Archaeal phyla Euryarchaeota and Thaumarchaeota dominated the activated sludge and sediment samples, respectively. According to the analysis of shared operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and reads among different samples, more bacterial OTUs and reads were shared between two samples from sites with a direct effluent connection, showing a clear correlation between the wastewater treatment plants and the effluent receiving bay area. The impact of second-hand pollution can be evaluated by comparing the bacterial community in different eco-environments with a direct effluent connection, especially when pristine samples are not available.

Assessing the composition of microbial communities in textile wastewater treatment plants in comparison with municipal wastewater treatment plants

“…With regard to the archaea, Euryarchaeota represented 94.6% of the total number of sequences, while Thaumarchaeota represented 5.4%, respectively. This is in line with previous studies where Euryarchaeota were found to dominate the archaeal community in activated sludge from municipal WWTPs (Ju et al., ; Zhang et al., ). Further, as also noticed in previous studies on microbial communities in activated sludge (Hu et al., ; Saunders et al., ; Wang et al., ; Wei et al., ; Yang et al., ; Zhang et al., ; Zhao et al., ), Proteobacteria was the most abundant bacterial phylum detected (44.3% of the total number of sequences), followed by Bacteroidetes (24.8%).…”

“…Notably, a great number of OTUs (40) belonging to the genus Planctomyces (Planctomycetes) were specifically found in textile WWTPs, suggesting that these bacteria are well‐adapted to the conditions encountered in textile wastewater treatment systems, which, for example, are typically characterized by a high salt concentration. As such, these findings are in line with previous research showing that these bacteria can thrive in salt‐rich environments (Zhang et al., ). Additionally, members of the genera Leucobacter (Actinobacteria) and Hydrogenophaga (Proteobacteria) were predominantly found in the textile‐activated sludge samples.…”

Exploring the Archaeome: Detection of Archaeal Signatures in the Human Body

“…As the archaeal primer 344F has often been used for detecting archaea in a variety of environmental samples (Zhang et al, 2014; Fontana et al, 2016), we further analyzed its coverage using TestProbe 3.0 (Klindworth et al, 2013) and the SILVA database SSU132 (Quast et al, 2013). The results revealed 73.2% coverage of the archaeal domain, a high coverage of the Euryarchaeota phylum (93.8%) and the genera within, especially Methanobrevibacter with 96.1% coverage, Methanosphaera with 89.9% and Methanomassiliicoccus with 100%.…”

Exploring the archaeome: detection of archaeal signatures in the human body

“…The class Wosearchaeia showed variable coverage between 65.2% and 89.5%. As the archaeal primer 344F has often been used for detecting archaea in a variety of environmental samples (Fontana et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2014), we took a closer look on its coverage capacity using the TestProbe 3.0 (Klindworth et al, 2013) and the SILVA database SSU132 .…”