Microbial community from in-field bioreactor perturbation study

We temporally monitored alterations in abiotic forces on microbial community structure (16S rRNA amplicon sequencing) using 1L in-field bioreactors receiving background and contaminated groundwater at the Oak Ridge Reservation, TN. Planktonic and biofilm microbial communities were initialized with background water for 4 days to establish communities in triplicate control reactors and triplicate test reactors and then fed filtered water for 14 days (days 4-18). On day 18, the three test reactors were switched to receive filtered groundwater from a contaminated well. Planktonic samples were collected from each reactor continuously during the experiment. Each reactor contained eight biofilm coupon samples to start. On day 18, before test reactors received contaminated water, four coupons from each control and test reactor were harvested and replaced with four new coupons. At the end of the experiment (day 31), all biofilms coupons in reactors were harvested.