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UNLABELLED: Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are indispensable biotechnology facilities for modern cities and play an essential role in modern urban infrastructure by employing microorganisms to remove pollutants in wastewater, thus protecting public health and the environment. This study conducted a 13-month bacterial community survey of six full-scale WWTPs in Hong Kong with samples of influent, activated sludge (AS), and effluent to explore their synchronism and asynchronism of bacterial community. Besides, we compared AS results of six Hong Kong WWTPs with data from 1,186 AS amplicon data in 269 global WWTPs and a 9-year metagenomic sequencing survey of a Hong Kong WWTP. Our results showed the compositions of bacterial communities varied and the bacterial community structure of AS had obvious differences across Hong Kong WWTPs. The co-occurrence analysis identified 40 pairs of relationships that existed among Hong Kong WWTPs to show solid associations between two species and stochastic processes took large proportions for the bacterial community assembly of six WWTPs. The abundance and distribution of the functional bacteria in worldwide and Hong Kong WWTPs were examined and compared, and we found that ammonia-oxidizing bacteria had more diversity than nitrite-oxidizing bacteria. Besides, Hong Kong WWTPs could make great contributions to the genome mining of microbial dark matter in the global wanted list. Operational parameters had important effects on OTUs abundance, such as the temperature to the genera of Tetrasphaera, Gordonia and Nitrospira. All these results obtained from this study can deepen our understanding of the microbial ecology in WWTPs and provide foundations for further studies. IMPORTANCE: Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are an indispensable component of modern cities, as they can remove pollutants in wastewater to prevent anthropogenic activities. Activated sludge (AS) is a fundamental wastewater treatment process and it harbors a highly complex microbial community that forms the main components and contains functional groups. Unveiling who is there is a long-term goal of the research on AS microbiology. High-throughput sequencing provides insights into the inventory diversity of microbial communities to an unprecedented level of detail. At present, the analysis of communities in WWTPs usually comes from a specific WWTP and lacks comparisons and verification among different WWTPs. The wide-scale and long-term sampling project and research in this study could help us evaluate the AS community more accurately to find the similarities and different results for different WWTPs in Hong Kong and other regions of the world.

Researchers replaced a tight turn in the cytokine sequence with the large loop in soybean trypsin inhibitor that binds to the active region of trypsin, based on the finding that the polent inflammatory cytokine human interleukin 1 beta has the same overall structure as soybean trypsin inhibitor (STI). The results permit the receptor and intracellular transduction regions on the protein to be mapped in detail.

Conventional membrane bioreactor (MBR) systems have increasingly been studied in recent decades. However, their applications have been limited due to their drawbacks such as low flux, membrane fouling, and high operating cost. In this study, a compact macro-filtration MBR (MfMBR) process was developed by using a large pore size membrane to mitigate the membrane fouling problem. A pilot trial of MfMBR process was set up and operated to treat 10 m3/day of saline wastewater within 4 h. The system was operated under an average permeate flux of 13.1 m3/ (m2·day) for 74 days. The average total suspended solids, total chemical oxygen demand, biological oxygen demand, total Kjeldahl nitrogen, and total nitrogen removal efficiencies achieved were 94.3, 83.1, 98.0, 93.1, and 63.3%, respectively, during steady-state operation. The confocal laser scanning microscopy image indicated that the backwash could effectively remove the bio-cake and dead bacteria. Thus, the results showed that the MfMBR process, which is essentially a primary wastewater treatment process, had the potential to yield the same high quality effluent standards as the secondary treatment process; thereby suggesting that it could be used as an option when the economic budget and/or land space is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]