Activated Sludge Samples

Here we employed eight lab-scale SBRs seeded with either acclimated or non-acclimated sludge with the objective of (i) assessing the effect of SRT on diversity of total bacterial taxa; (ii) investigating community dynamics of total, dominant and rare bacterial taxa under stable process performance; and iii) evaluating reproducibility in bacterial community structure between replicate SBRs. We combined 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing with multivariate statistical analysis for an in-depth understanding of community diversity, dynamics and reproducibility.