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DETERMINATION OF MICROBIAL COMMUNITY STRUCTURE IN UNTREATED WASTEWATER FROM DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHIC LOCALES
Citation:
SHANKS, O. C., C. A. KELTY, S. M. Huse, M. L. Sogin, R. J. Newton, AND S. L. McLellan. DETERMINATION OF MICROBIAL COMMUNITY STRUCTURE IN UNTREATED WASTEWATER FROM DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHIC LOCALES. Presented at International Society of Microbial Ecology 13th International Meeting, Seattle, WA, August 22 - 27, 2010.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Microbial sewage communities consist of a combination of human faecal microorganisms and urban infrastructure-derived microbes originating from infiltration of rainwater and stormwater inputs. Together these different sources of microbial diversity form a unique population structure that may serve as a signature for sewage discharges and a source of candidate alternative indicators specific for human fecal pollution. However, the variability of this unique community structure across geographic space remains uncharacterized. We used massively parallel 454 pyrosequencing of hypervariable regions in rRNA genes to profile microbial communities from 13 untreated sewage influent samples. Sewage samples were collected from different geographic locations in the United States ranging from Hawaii to Florida. We obtained a total of 380,175 high quality sequences for sequence-based clustering, taxonomic analyses, and profile comparisons. All sewage profiles included a discernible human faecal pollution signature made up of several taxonomic groups including Firmicutes (21.7%), Bacteroidetes (11.4%), Actinobacteria (1.47%), and Fusobacteria (1.31%) genera. The most abundant taxonomic groups were from the Proteobacteria phylum (61.9%) and were dominated by Gammaproteobacteria (38.2%) and Betaproteobacteria (18.3%). The taxonomic composition of human fecal- and urban infrastructure-derived microbes remained surprisingly congruent across all untreated sewage samples. Together, these results suggest that untreated sewage bacterial communities maintain a core group of fecal and urban environment microbes across geographically dispersed wastewater treatment facilities, and that alternative fecal indicators targeting multiple hypervariable rRNA gene targets may lead to improved methods for the detection of sewage-derived fecal pollution in ambient waters.