title: Bacterial community structure in geographically distributed biological wastewater treatment reactors.
abstract: Current knowledge of the microbial communities within biological wastewater treatment reactors is incomplete due to limitations of traditional culture-based techniques and despite the emergence of recently applied molecular techniques. Here we demonstrate the application of high-density microarrays targeting universal 16S rRNA genes to evaluate microbial community composition in five biological wastewater treatment reactors in China and the United States. Results suggest a surprisingly consistent composition of microbial community structure among all five reactors. All investigated communities contained a core of bacterial phyla (53-82% of 2119 taxa identified) with almost identical compositions (as determined by colinearity analysis). These core species were distributed widely in terms of abundance but their proportions were virtually the same in all samples. Proteobacteria was the largest phylum and Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes were the subdominant phyla. The diversity among the samples can be attributed solely to a group of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that were detected only in specific samples. Typically, these organisms ranked somewhat lower in terms of abundance but a few were present is much higher proportions.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, PR China. siqingxia@gmail.com
authors.forename: Siqing
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Duan
authors.forename: Yonghui
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Jixiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Yvette M
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Piceno
authors.forename: Gary L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Andersen
authors.forename: Lisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Alvarez-Cohen
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moreno-Andrade
authors.forename: Chun-Lin
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Slawomir W
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Hermanowicz
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D019149:Bioreactors; D010802:Phylogeny; D012722:Sewage / Q000382:microbiology; D014871:Water Microbiology
chemical_list: D012722:Sewage