Predicting the acclimatisation of microbial wastewater treatment communities as a function of the environment, random immigration, birth and death
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Glasgow
Department Name: Civil Engineering
Abstract
For a wastewater treatment plant to work dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different species of bacteria and protozoa must come together to form a microbial community that will transform the waste into biomass, CO2 or some other, hopefully less harmful, substance. Once formed the microbial community will often go through processes of acclimatisation where it adapts to changes in environmental conditions. This is a fundamental aspect of all biological treatment that, at present we can only engineer empirically. There is no a priori method for determining how long it will take for a reactor to acquire or lose a particular adaptation and practitioners are often have little more to go on than luck and judgment. In this proposal we aim to develop mathematical model for predicting acclimitisation. We will conduct a definitive set of experiments along with a comprehensive statistical analysis to ascertain the relative importance of environmental and stochastic effects in determining the composition of microbial communities used to treat wastewater. We will concentrate on the predicting shifts in community composition that will occur in response to systematic changes in ambient temperature. This has particular relevance to anaerobic systems which are attractive to the water industry because of their low carbon foot print, but are very sensitive to low temperatures. Cold adapted methanogenic communities are known to exist and in principle they could be used to seed a cold adapted anaerobic reactor. However, if such a reactor was run at ambient temperatures it would lose its cold adaptation in warmer months. Thus a theoretical framework for predicting the rate of acclimatisation in a reactor could be used very widely. Applications could stretch far beyond the environmental services industry. The same conceptual and mathematical approach will have value in all open microbiological systems be they engineered, medical or agricultural and could be critical to the application of engineered organisms envisaged in the nascent field of synthetic biology.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
William Sloan (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Bautista-De Los Santos Q
(2016)
Emerging investigators series: microbial communities in full-scale drinking water distribution systems - a meta-analysis
in Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology
Bautista-De Los Santos QM
(2016)
The impact of sampling, PCR, and sequencing replication on discerning changes in drinking water bacterial community over diurnal time-scales.
in Water research
Brown MR
(2019)
Coupled virus - bacteria interactions and ecosystem function in an engineered microbial system.
in Water research
Connelly S
(2017)
Bioreactor Scalability: Laboratory-Scale Bioreactor Design Influences Performance, Ecology, and Community Physiology in Expanded Granular Sludge Bed Bioreactors.
in Frontiers in microbiology
Couto JM
(2018)
The effect of metabolic stress on genome stability of a synthetic biology chassis Escherichia coli K12 strain.
in Microbial cell factories
Feder M
(2015)
Influence of biofilms on heavy metal immobilization in sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS).
in Environmental technology
Heidrich ES
(2018)
Temperature, inocula and substrate: Contrasting electroactive consortia, diversity and performance in microbial fuel cells.
in Bioelectrochemistry (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Knox G
(2019)
Engineering artificial thermal mountains for large-scale water management and carbon drawdown
in Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology
Liu Z
(2019)
Neutral mechanisms and niche differentiation in steady-state insular microbial communities revealed by single cell analysis.
in Environmental microbiology
Mußmann M
(2011)
Thaumarchaeotes abundant in refinery nitrifying sludges express amoA but are not obligate autotrophic ammonia oxidizers
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Ofiteru ID
(2010)
Combined niche and neutral effects in a microbial wastewater treatment community.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Oh ST
(2010)
Sustainable wastewater treatment: how might microbial fuel cells contribute.
in Biotechnology advances
Pholchan MK
(2013)
Microbial community assembly, theory and rare functions.
in Frontiers in microbiology
Ramanan B
(2010)
Application of Paramagnetically Tagged Molecules for Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Biofilm Mass Transport Processes
in Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Ramanan B
(2012)
Investigation of nanoparticle transport inside coarse-grained geological media using magnetic resonance imaging.
in Environmental science & technology
Schirmer M
(2014)
Benchmarking of viral haplotype reconstruction programmes: an overview of the capacities and limitations of currently available programmes.
in Briefings in bioinformatics
Schroeder JL
(2015)
Probabilistic models to describe the dynamics of migrating microbial communities.
in PloS one
Sloan WT
(2021)
Drift dynamics in microbial communities and the effective community size.
in Environmental microbiology
Susithra Lakshmanan
(2010)
Imaging nanoparticle transport with magnetic resonance imaging
in GEOCHIMICA ET COSMOCHIMICA ACTA
Tsagkari E
(2018)
The Role of the Motility of Methylobacterium in Bacterial Interactions in Drinking Water
in Water
Tsagkari E
(2018)
Turbulence accelerates the growth of drinking water biofilms.
in Bioprocess and biosystems engineering
Tsagkari E
(2017)
A Keystone Methylobacterium Strain in Biofilm Formation in Drinking Water
in Water
Widder S
(2016)
Challenges in microbial ecology: building predictive understanding of community function and dynamics.
in The ISME journal
Widder S
(2014)
Fluvial network organization imprints on microbial co-occurrence networks.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Woodcock S
(2017)
Biofilm community succession: a neutral perspective.
in Microbiology (Reading, England)
Description | Engineers have always wondered why the dynamics of large bacterial populations in big bioreactors are so rapid. Conventional theory suggests that they should be much slower. Here we can get the conventional theories to predict fast dynamics if we adopt a new concept of 'effective community' size that arise from the natural propesity for bacteria to clump. We back this up with experiments. |
Exploitation Route | They should change the way we design bioreactors |
Sectors | Chemicals,Environment,Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |
Description | Optimising decentralised low-cost wastewater infrastructure by managing the microbes |
Amount | £1,191,997 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/P029329/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 05/2017 |
End | 04/2021 |
Description | Osmotic Membrane Technologies for Energy Neutral Wastewater Treatment: Process Performance and Optimization |
Amount | £98,575 (GBP) |
Funding ID | EP/N022130/1 |
Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
Sector | Public |
Country | United Kingdom |
Start | 07/2016 |
End | 05/2018 |