[Microbial ecology analysis of the biofilm from two biological contact oxidation processes with different...

This study investigated the performance of one-step aerobic biological oxidation process and anoxic/aerobic two-step biological oxidation process treating modeled river water containing low carbon and rich ammonia. Biofilm microbial ecology was analyzed with multiple molecular technologies including PCR-DGGE, FISH/CLSM and FISH/FCM to investigate the succession of bacteria community and space distribution along with abundance of the main functional bacteria, and to research the micro-influential factors and the mechanism of different biological contact oxidation processes for their performance. Results showed that two-step contact oxidation process achieved higher removal percentage than that of the one-step process, with COD and NH4(+) -N removal enhanced about 10% and 32%-59%, respectively. A much thicker biofilm was obtained by the one-step process compared to the two-step process, and nitrobacterium was mainly distributed in the depth of 180-200 microm and 105-125 microm, respectively. PCR-DGGE results found that the two-step process demonstrated less microbial diversity than that of the one-step process, FISH/FCM results showed that ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and nitrite oxidizing bacteria (NOB) abundance increased in the two-step process with the increase of operation time, while that of the one-step process declined. Experiment results demonstrate that functional partitioning of the anoxic-aerobic two-step biological contact oxidation process could be in favor for harvesting nitrobacteria and other special bacteria in different reactor spaces, which can improve removal efficiency for organics and ammonia finally.