Microbial Community Composition in Municipal Wastewater Treatment Bioreactors Follows a Distance Decay Pattern Primarily Controlled by Environmental Heterogeneity.

ABSTRACT: Understanding spatiotemporal patterns in microbial community composition is a central goal of microbial ecology. The objective of this study was to better understand the biogeography of activated sludge microbial communities, which are important for the protection of surface water quality. Monthly samples were collected from 20 facilities (25 bioreactors) within 442 km of each other for 1 year. Microbial community composition was characterized by sequencing of PCR-amplified 16S rRNA gene fragments. Statistically significant distance decay of community similarity was observed in these bioreactors independent of clustering method (operational taxonomic units [OTUs] at 97% similarity, genus-level phylotypes) and community dissimilarity metric (Sørensen, Bray-Curtis, and weighted Unifrac). Uni

SUBMITTER: Kim T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8527990 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature