Influence of 3-Chloroaniline on the Biofilm Lifestyle of Comamonas testosteroni and Its Implications on Bioaugmentation

Abstract

Bioaugmentation has been frequently proposed in wastewater and soil treatment to remove toxic aromatic compounds. The performance of bioaugmentation is affected by a number of biological and environmental factors, including the interaction between the target pollutant and the augmented bacterial cells. In this study, using Comamonas testosteroni and 3-chloroaniline (3-CA) as the model organism and target pollutant, we explored the influence of toxic aromatic pollutants on the biofilm lifestyle of bacteria capable of degrading aromatic compounds toward a better understanding of cell-pollutant interaction in bioaugmentation. Our results showed that the exposure to 3-CA greatly reduced the retention of C. testosteroni cells in packed-bed bioreactors (from 22% to 15% after three pore volumes), which could be attributed to the altered bacterial motility and cell surface hydrophobicity. To further understand the molecular mechanisms, we employed an integrated genomic and transcriptomic analysis to examine the influence of 3-CA on the expression of genes important to the biofilm lifestyle of C. testosteroni. We found that exposure to 3-CA reduced the intracellular c-di-GMP level by downregulating the expression of genes encoding c-di-GMP synthases and induced massive cell dispersal from the biofilms. Our findings provide novel environmental implications on bioaugmentation, particularly in biofilm reactors, for the treatment of wastewater containing recalcitrant industrial pollutants. IMPORTANCEBioaugmentation is a bioremediation approach that often has been described in the literature but has almost never been successfully applied in practice. Many biological and environmental factors influence the overall performance of bioaugmentation. Among these, the interaction between the target pollutant and the augmented bacterial cells is one of the most important factors. In this study, we revealed the influence of toxic aromatic pollutants on the biofilm lifestyle of bacteria capable of degrading aromatic compounds toward a better understanding of cell-pollutant interaction in bioaugmentation. Our findings provide novel environmental implications on bioaugmentation for the treatment of wastewater containing recalcitrant industrial pollutants; in particular, the exposure to toxic pollutants may reduce the retention of augmented organisms in biofilm reactors by reducing the c-di-GMP level, and approaches to elevating or maintaining a high c-di-GMP level may be promising to establish and maintain sustainable bioaugmentation activity.A romatic compounds are widely used in chemical and pharmaceutical industries (1). These organic compounds contain chemically stable benzene ring structures, hence their degradation by naturally occurring microbial communities in the contaminated environments is often slow (2, 3). This is because the indigenous microbial community usually lacks efficient catabolic capabilities for these anthropogenic compounds. To efficiently remove these toxic compounds from contaminated water or soil, bioa...

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“…RNA extraction and sequencing analysis were conducted as previously described (Wu et al ., 2015a,b, 2016) on mid‐logarithmic stage culture of MR‐1 WT and MR‐1/pYedQ 2 using the RNeasy mini Kit (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany), RNase‐free DNase set (Qiagen) and Illumina HiSeq2500 (Illumina, San Diego, CA, USA) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Experimental details can be found in Supplementary Information (Text S2).…”

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