Effects of low temperature on the microbial community of MBBR filler biofilm

ABSTRACT Moving bed biofilm reactors can purify urban domestic sewage through microbial biodegradation. High-throughput sequencing was used to study the response mechanism of the biofilm microbial community to temperature. The effluent quality of the reactor declined with the decrease in temperature. Proteobacteria, Bacteroidota, and Nitrospirota were the dominant bacteria, accounting for 59.2, 11.9, and 9.4%, respectively. Gammaproteobacteria (38.3%), Alphaproteobacteria (23.2%), and Bacteroidia (12.4%) were the dominant bacteria at the class level. Low temperature had an obvious directional domestication effect on microbial flora, and the composition of the bacterial community was more similar. Pseudomonas was one of the dominant bacterial groups at 5 °C. Nitrospira (p < 0.001) and Trichococcus (p < 0.05) were significantly negatively correlated with effluent ammonia nitrogen and significantly positively correlated with NO3− (p < 0.05) at low temperature. Functional bacteria related to chemoheterotrophy (25.88%) and aerobic_chemoheterotrophy (21.56%) accounted for a relatively high proportion. The bacteria related to nitrate reduction only accounted for 2.62%. Studies have shown that low temperatures can inhibit the growth of nitrogen-cycling bacteria, and few domesticated and selected nitrogen-cycling bacteria play a major role in the removal and transformation of ammonia nitrogen. The degradation of chemical oxygen demand can still be achieved through the adsorption and degradation of dominant functional bacteria.