Development of pretreatment protocol for DNA extraction from biofilm attached to biologic activated carbon (BAC) granules

Abstract

The biologic activated carbon (BAC) process is widely used in drinking water treatments. A comprehensive molecular analysis of the microbial community structure provides very helpful data to improve the reactor performance. However, the bottleneck of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) extraction from BAC attached biofilm has to be solved since the conventional procedure was unsuccessful due to firm biomass attachment and adsorption capacity of the BAC granules. In this study, five pretreatments were compared, and adding skim milk followed by ultrasonic vibration was proven to be the optimal choice. This protocol was further tested using the vertical BAC samples from the full-scale biofilter of Pinghu Water Plant. The results showed the DNA yielded a range of 40 μg·g^-1 BAC (dry weight) to over 100 μg·g^-1 BAC (dry weight), which were consistent with the biomass distribution. All results suggested that the final protocol could produce qualified genomic DNA as a template from the BAC filter for downstream molecular biology researches.

Keywords

bacterial DNA extraction / biological activated carbon (BAC) / biofilm / water treatment / pretreatment protocol

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Acknowledgements

The financial support of this study was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50678080), Key Project of the Knowledge Innovation Program, Chinese Academy of Science (Grant No. KZCX2-YW-452), and the 100 Talents Program, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg