Microbial Ecology of Soil Treatment System

Microbes are present practically everywhere. What shapes microbial community assemblies is always a question of interest for Environmental Engineers. However, little is known about the ecological processes that control microbial community assembly in engineered ecosystems such as wastewater treatment plants. A better understanding of these ecological processes can help to improve the treatment performance of the system. Using a combination of several approaches, it is now possible to resolve ecological processes over space and time

The primary objective of this project will be to assess the relative importance of different community assembly (ecological) processes in a real-scale on-site wastewater treatment system. This study will investigate the microbial ecology of the system using microbial DNA sequencing. This research will involve DNA sequences processing using bioinformatics tools.

The study will combine a simple mass balance approach with 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to estimate the SRT and net growth rates of the microbes present in the treatment system.  This study will help get a better insight into the microbial ecology of the on-site wastewater treatment system.