Bacterial communities in bioaugmented reactors

Bioaugmentation serves as an effective strategy in the treatment of refractory organic pollutants in industrial wastewater, but the bacterial community assembly mechanisms in bioaugmented systems remain obscured. This project established four identical moving bed biological reactors (MBBRs) bioaugmented with a highly efficient pyridine-degrading strain, which were treated with different AHL-based quorum sensing (QS) conditions. Using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, we gained insights into the succession patterns of the bacterial communities in the four MBBRs and disclosed the community assembly mechanisms and ecological interactions within these systems.