Microbial community structure in different wastewater treatment processes characterized by single-strand-conformation polymorphism (SSCP) technique

In order to investigate microbial community structures in different wastewater treatment processes and understand the relationship between the structures and the status of processes, the microbial community diversity, variety and distribution in five wastewater treatment processes were studied by a culture-independent genetic fingerprinting technique single-strand-conformation polymorphism (SSCP). The five processes included a denitrification and phosphorus removal bioreactor (N), Chinese traditional medicine wastewater treatment bioreactor (P), beer wastewater treatment bioreactor (W), fermentative biohydrogen production bioreactor (H) and sulfate-reduction bioreactor (S). The results indicate that the microbial community profiles in the same wastewater bioreactors are very similar. The diversity of microbial populations is correlated with the complexity of organic contaminants in wastewater. Chinese traditional medicine wastewater contains more complex organic components, so the population diversity is higher than that of simple nutrient bioreactors fed with molasses wastewater. Compared with the strain bands in a simulated community, the relative proportion of some functional microbial populations in bioreactors was not dominant, namely, fermentative biohydrogen producer Ethanologenbacterium sp. in the better condition bioreactor had only 5% band density, and the Desulfovibrio sp. in the sulfate-reducing bioreactor had less than 1.5% band density. SSCP profiles can define the difference in microbial community structures in wastewater treatment processes and monitor some of the functional microbes in these processes, providing useful guidance for improving its efficiency.