Document Type
Article
Rights
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence
Disciplines
2.7 ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Abstract
Analyses of biofilm community structure may potentially be employed for aquatic ecosystem health assessment, however, to date, biofilm diversity within urban lakes using reclaimed water has not been examined. Accordingly, the microbial community diversity and structure of biofilms from the surface of multiple matrices with varying roughness (0.1, 1.0 and 10.0 μm) were characterized using a suite of molecular techniques including scanning electron microscopy, genetic fingerprinting and phospholipid-derived fatty acid analyses. Samples were largely comprised of inorganic particles, algae and numerous bacterial species; 12 phospholipid-derived fatty acid (PLFA) types were identified, significantly less than typically associated with sewage. Both growth matrix surface roughness and biofilm growth phase were shown to concur with significantly different microbial quantity and community structures. Gram-negative bacteria bacillus i15:03OH and 18:0 were the dominant bacterial genera, collectively comprising ≈75 % of identified PLFA species content. Calculated species diversity (H) and species dominance (D) exhibited identical correlational patterns with measured water quality parameters; significant positive correlations were exhibited with respect to Mg2, while significant negative correlations were found for NO3, TP, BOD, COD, SP, PO4, SO4 and pH. Results indicate that analyses of biofilm formation and structure could be effectively used to undertake integrated assessments of the ecological health of lake systems using reclaimed water. Further work is required to elucidate the optimum conditions for sample collection and analytical interpretation.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-015-5197-6
Recommended Citation
Wang, T., Li, Y., Xu, T. et al. Biofilm microbial community structure in an urban lake utilizing reclaimed water. Environ Earth Sci 75, 314 (2016). DOI: 10.1007/s12665-015-5197-6
Funder
National Natural Science Fund of China; Beijing Eleventh Five-Year Research Program; Special Fund for Scientific Research of Water Conservancy in the Public Interest
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Publication Details
Uploaded to ResearchGate.
Environmental Earth Sciences journal, published by Springer: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12665-015-5197-6#citeas