Community dynamics of ammonia oxidizing bacteria in a full-scale wastewater treatment system with nitrification stability

Abstract

To determine whether the functional stability of nitrification was correlated to a stable community structure of ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) in a full-scale wastewater treatment plant, the AOB community dynamics in a wastewater treatment system was monitored over one year. The community dynamics were investigated using specific PCR followed by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis of the amoA gene. The T-RFLP results indicated that during the period of nitrification stability, the AOB community structure in the full-scale wastewater treatment system was relatively stable, and the average change rate every 15 d of the system was 6.6%±5.8%. The phylogenetic analysis of the cloned amoA gene showed clearly that the dominant AOB in the system was Nitrosomonas spp. The results of this study indicated that throughout the study period, the AOB community structure was relatively stable in the full-scale wastewater treatment system with functional stability of nitrification.

Keywords

ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) / community dynamics / terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) / nitrification performance

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51078207), Mega-projects of Science Research for Water (No. 2008ZX07313-3), the Program of Research on Key Technology of Environmental Pollution Control and Quality Improvement (No. 2007DFC90170), and Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (No. 20090002770003).

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