Persistency of organic pollutant in aquatic and soil ecosystems is strongly connected to the biodegradation capacity of native microbial community. However, not all microbial communities have the capacity to efficiently degrade emerging chemicals. Several investigations have demonstrated the adaptation capacity of microbial communities to new chemicals. In their natural environment microorganisms tend to adapt to pollutants upon long term exposure, allowing for the development of efficient and fast degradation over time. This adaptation capacity of microorganism could be used to develop adapted inoculum in an objective of bioremediation in order to degrade emerging pollutants that were initially persistent. The aim of our project is to study microbial adaptation to persistent chemicals using long term exposure in various culturing systems. This in turn might lead to a faster rate of degradation of chemicals that were initially persistent. Our approach is to expose microbial communities from activated sludge, growing in chemostat and batch culturing systems, to different chemicals for a long term and under defined conditions. Three model chemicals are used in this project; 4-chloroaniline, N-methylpiperazine and metformin. These products are considered as emerging pollutants and are environmentally persistent according to ready biodegradation testing. The biodegradation capacity of pre-exposed inoculum is assessed in biodegradation testing and changes in community structure are followed by Illumina amplicon sequencing in time. Removal of tested chemicals and their transformation products are determined by LC-MS/MS. The results of this experiment show enhanced biodegradation capacity enhancement of the inoculum after pre-exposure. These will result in a better understanding of the relationship between microbial adaptation and biodegradation performance. Ultimately they will also allow more realistic predictions of their biodegradation in the environment compared to those obtained using standard testing protocols.

Adaptation of microbial communities to emerging pollutants in chemostat systems

255th National Meeting (2018)

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