Microorganisms in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play critical roles in sustaining ecosystem functioning, environments, human health and society, but the mechanisms controlling their diversity and biogeographic patterns remain elusive. Using a systematic global-sampling effort, we analyzed microbiomes from ~1,200 activated sludge samples taken from 269 WWTPs in 23 countries on 6 continents. These samples were characterized by 16S rRNA gene amplicon and part of them also by metagenomic sequencing. Our analysis revealed that the global AS microbial communities follow lognormal distribution with ~1 billion (10<sup>9</sup>) microbial species. Although the AS microbial communities are highly diverse with majority (~80%) of sequences not represented in the current databases at species level, there is a global core microbial community (0.05%) strongly linked to WWTP functions. In contrast to macroorganism studies, however, no latitudinal diversity gradient was observed. Mata-analysis with global datasets from various habitats indicated that AS microbiome is more closely related to freshwater microbiome. Further analysis revealed that spatial turnovers of the AS microbial communities are scale-dependent and driven largely by stochastic (e.g. dispersal limitation, drifts) as well as deterministic (e.g. organic C, temperature) processes. We got 222 metagenomes with an average size of 14G. These metagenomes resulted in 3140 high-quality draft genomes with completeness &gt; 70% and contamination &lt; 5%, which represent a series of functionally important taxa in wastewater treatment.

Global wastewater microbiome: Taxonomic and functional diversity

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.