Functional analysis of activated sludge systems via high-throughput sequencing.

The activated sludge process for biological water treatment is widely used but in many aspects still poorly understood. New developments in this field are aerobic granular sludge processes and resource recovery from wastewater. The production of alginate-like biopolymers (ALE) fits well within these emerging technologies/topics. However, to fully take advantage of the possibilities of AS systems, more insight is needed in the composition and dynamics of the microbial community governing the process. A increasingly popular molecular technique to study AS systems is 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, which allows to obtain a full phylogenetic overview of the microbial community in the sludge. However, a link between phylogenetic data and functional information ('which organism does what?') is still largely missing. The specific objectives of this project are two-fold:- explore the potential of an alternative approach, namely amplicon sequencing of functional genes, and compare this approach to the results obtained with 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, and by qPCR analysis- apply this strategy to investigate abundance and diversity of ALE biosynthesis genes in AS systems

Keywords:GENOMICS, ACTIVATED SLUDGE, BIO-POLYMERS

Disciplines:Genetics, Microbiology, Systems biology, Laboratory medicine, Molecular and cell biology