학술논문

Urban wastewater bacterial communities assemble into seasonal steady states
Document Type
Original Paper
Source
Microbiome. 9(1)
Subject
Wastewater
Sewer
Microbial ecology
Urban microbiome
Time series
Seasonal dynamics
Language
English
ISSN
2049-2618
Abstract
Background: Microorganisms in urban sanitary sewers exhibit community properties that suggest sewers are a novel ecosystem. Sewer microorganisms present both an opportunity as a control point for wastewater treatment and a risk to human health. If treatment processes are to be improved and health risks quantified, then it is necessary to understand microbial distributions and dynamics within this community. Here, we use 16S rRNA gene sequencing to characterize raw influent wastewater bacterial communities in a 5-year time series from two wastewater treatment plants in Milwaukee, WI; influent wastewater from 77 treatment plants across the USA; and wastewater in 12 Milwaukee residential sewers.Results: In Milwaukee, we find that in transit from residences to treatment plants, the human bacterial component of wastewater decreases in proportion and exhibits stochastic temporal variation. In contrast, the resident sewer community increases in abundance during transit and cycles seasonally according to changes in wastewater temperature. The result is a bacterial community that assembles into two distinct community states each year according to the extremes in wastewater temperature. Wastewater bacterial communities from other northern US cities follow temporal trends that mirror those in Milwaukee, but southern US cities have distinct community compositions and differ in their seasonal patterns.Conclusions: Our findings provide evidence that environmental conditions associated with seasonal change and climatic differences related to geography predictably structure the bacterial communities residing in below-ground sewer pipes.DoZVvrVoCyPBLkvDJ_Cd4MVideo abstract