State Key Laboratory of Environmental Aquatic Chemistry, Key Laboratory of Drinking Water Science and Technology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, PR China.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
Water Res. 2024 Sep 15;262:122047. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2024.122047. Epub 2024 Jul 4.
Dissolved organic matter (DOM) plays a pivotal role in drinking water treatment, influencing the performance of unit processes and final water quality (e.g. disinfection byproduct risk). Biofiltration is an effective method of reducing DOM, but currently lacks a comprehensive appreciation of the association between microbial profiles and biofiltration performance. In this study, bench-scale biofiltration units inoculated with microbial consortia from river and soil matrices were operated successively for comparing their efficacy in terms of DOM removal. The results showed that biofiltration units receiving soil microbes were significantly superior (p < 0.05) to those receiving river inoculated microbes in terms of decomposing DOM recalcitrant fractions and reducing DBP formation potential, resulting in DOC and DBP precursor removals of up to 58.4 % and 87.9 %, respectively. Characterization of the taxonomic composition revealed that differences in the microbial assembly of the two biofilter groups were subject to deterministic rather than stochastic factors. Furthermore, more complicated interspecific relationships and niche structures in soil inoculated biofilters were deciphered by co-occurrence network, providing a plausible profile on a taxonomic division of labor in DOM stepwise degradation. Accordingly, the contribution of microbial compositions was found to be of greater importance than the GAC mass and biomass attached to the media. Thus, this study has advanced the understanding of microbial-mediated DOM decomposition in biofiltration, and also provided a promising strategy for enhancing the process for water use via developing appropriate engineered consortia of bacteria.
溶解有机物（DOM）在饮用水处理中起着关键作用，影响单元工艺的性能和最终水质（例如消毒副产物风险）。生物过滤是降低 DOM 的有效方法，但目前缺乏对微生物特征与生物过滤性能之间关联的全面认识。本研究连续运行了接种自河流和土壤基质微生物群落的中试规模生物过滤单元，以比较它们在去除 DOM 方面的效果。结果表明，接收土壤微生物的生物过滤单元在分解 DOM 顽固部分和降低 DBP 形成潜力方面明显优于接收河流接种微生物的单元，导致 DOC 和 DBP 前体的去除率分别高达 58.4%和 87.9%。分类组成的特征表明，两组生物滤器中微生物组合的差异受确定性因素而非随机因素的影响。此外，通过共生网络对土壤接种生物滤器中更复杂的种间关系和生态位结构进行了解码，为 DOM 逐步降解中的分类分工提供了一个合理的模式。因此，发现微生物组成的贡献比附着在介质上的 GAC 质量和生物量更为重要。因此，本研究提高了对生物过滤中微生物介导的 DOM 分解的理解，并且还通过开发适当的细菌工程化群落，为增强水利用过程提供了有希望的策略。
