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Medium shapes the microbial community of water filters with implications for effluent quality.
Journal article

Medium shapes the microbial community of water filters with implications for effluent quality.

  • Vignola M School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom; College of Science and Engineering, Division of Infrastructure and Environment, School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, United Kingdom. Electronic address: marta.vignola@glasgow.ac.uk.
  • Werner D School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.
  • Wade MJ School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.
  • Meynet P School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom; Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Überlandstr. 133, Dübendorf, CH-8600, Switzerland.
  • Davenport RJ School of Engineering, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom.
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  • 2017-12-02
Published in:
  • Water research. - 2018
Drinking water quality
Microbial ecology
Neutral model
Water filter
Bacteria
Drinking Water
Filtration
RNA, Ribosomal, 16S
Water Microbiology
Water Purification
Water Quality
English Little is known about the forces that determine the assembly of diverse bacterial communities inhabiting drinking water treatment filters and how this affects drinking water quality. Two contrasting ecological theories can help to understand how natural microbial communities assemble; niche theory and neutral theory, where environmental deterministic factors or stochastic factors predominate respectively. This study investigates the development of the microbial community on two common contrasting filter materials (quartz sand and granular activated carbon-GAC), to elucidate the main factors governing their assembly, through the evaluation of environmental (i.e. filter medium type) and stochastic forces (random deaths, births and immigration). Laboratory-scale filter columns were used to mimic a rapid gravity filter; the microbiome of the filter materials, and of the filter influent and effluent, was characterised using next generation 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and flow-cytometry. Chemical parameters (i.e. dissolved organic carbon, trihalomethanes formation) were also monitored to assess the final effluent quality. The filter communities seemed to be strongly assembled by selection rather than neutral processes, with only 28% of those OTUs shared with the source water detected on the filter medium following predictions using a neutral community model. GAC hosted a phylogenetically more diverse community than sand. The two filter media communities seeded the effluent water, triggering differences in both water quality and community composition of the effluents. Overall, GAC proved to be better than sand in controlling microbial growth, by promoting higher bacterial decay rates and hosting less bacterial cells, and showed better performance for putative pathogen control by leaking less Legionella cells into the effluent water.
Language
  • English
Open access status
hybrid
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/105687
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