Abstract
A fatal bulking phenomenon was found to occur occasionally in the methanogenic granular sludge of a mesophilic (35–40°C), full-scale upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor treating organic wastewater discharged from a sugar manufacturing factory. A vast number of filamentous cells were observed in the bulking sludge that were morphologically distinct from the previously recognized anaerobic bulking agent Anaerolinea thermophila. 16S rRNA gene-based analyses of the microbial populations in the bulking sludge revealed that the dominant filamentous organisms were members of proposed candidate bacterial phylum, KSB3. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis of the healthy sludge granules showed that the KSB3 filaments were the dominant granule surface population suggesting that they are fundamental constituents of the sludge granules and that they occasionally overgrow in the reactor, possibly triggering the filamentous bulking. We surveyed 10 additional mesophilic and thermophilic anaerobic sludges for the presence and diversity of KSB3 populations. Bacteria closely related to the characterized KSB3 filaments were present in two types of mesophilically grown UASB sludge granules treating actual wastewater discharged from sugar-processing industries.
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Acknowledgements
This study was carried out as a part of the project, which was entrusted to the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Tokyo, Japan. This study was also supported financially by research grant 1552481 from the Grants-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows and by several research grants from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. This work was also performed, in part, under the auspices of the DOE's Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program; the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, under contract no. W-7405-Eng-48; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under contract no. DE-AC03-76SF00098; and Los Alamos National Laboratory under contract no. W-7405-ENG-36.
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Yamada, T., Yamauchi, T., Shiraishi, K. et al. Characterization of filamentous bacteria, belonging to candidate phylum KSB3, that are associated with bulking in methanogenic granular sludges. ISME J 1, 246–255 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2007.28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2007.28
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