Contrasting microbial community composition and function perspective in sections of a full-scale coking wastewater treatment system

To characterize the microbial community of the coking wastewater (CWW) treatment system and to study the effects of CWW characteristics and operational parameters on microbial communities, active sludge samples were collected from a full-scale CWW treatment plant using three-phase fluidized bed biological reactors. High-throughput MiSeq sequencing was used to examine the 16S rRNA genes of microbiology, revealing a distinct microbial composition among the active sludge samples of three sequential bioreactors. Pseudomonas, Comamonas, and Thiobacillus-related sequences dominated in the anaerobic bioreactor A, aerobic bioreactor O-1, and aerobic bioreactor O-2 active sludge with relative abundance of 72.59, 56.75, and 27.82 %, respectively. The physico-chemical characteristics of CWW were analyzed by standard methods and operational parameters were recorded to examine their effects on the microbial communities. The redundancy analysis (RDA) results showed that the bacterial communities of bioreactors A, O-1, and O-2 correlated strongly with cyanides, phenols, and ammonia, respectively. These results expand the knowledge about the biodiversity and population dynamics of microorganisms and discerned the relationships between bacterial communities and environmental variables in the biological treatment processes in the full-scale CWW treatment system.