Microbial diversity of aerobic granular sludge under different operational conditions

Abstract

This paper depicts the research conducted at lab scale on aerobic granular sludge sequential biological reactors for wastewater treatment in order to assess the influence of operational parameters on the treatment performances and microbial diversity of the granules. The proposed objectives were reached by testing in similar reactor conditions different organic nitrogen and phosphorus loading rates. The study focused both on treatment performances as organic, nitrogen and phosphorus removal based on chemical analysis of main quality parameters and on diversity of microbial population in granules based on real-time polymerase chain reaction by targeting mainly the specific species or functional genes with high influence on process performance in terms of nitrification, denitrification and phosphorus removal.