Establishing a metagenomics-assisted approach for the isolation and identification of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria—A case study of the wetlands in Southern Taiwan

Abstract

Sulfide is a common contaminant in livestock waste It not only causes problems for odor nuisance but leads poisoning in to human Removing sulfide from wastewater has great importance of livestock management As sulfur-oxidizing bacteria (SOB) utilize sulfide as energy and convert it to sulfate the isolates mainly from wetlands have been applied in wastewater treatments This study aims to establish an enrichment process to isolate local strains of SOB with monitoring by 16S-metagenomics The soil from four coastal wetlands around Tainan Qigu (QG) Sicao (SC) Jiading (JD) and Yongan (YA) was collected for initiating enrichment culture In wetland microbial community the salinity was a major determinant to distinguish the JD samples which had low salinity from the other higher salt content location Such effect also extended to the enrichment culture In JD sample the sulfur-oxidizing activity of enrichment was higher than single strain and the sample from the other locations showed an opposite pattern The metabolism prediction indicated that bacteria in JD samples were favored to cooperate for coexistence; most bacteria from enrichment culture from the other locations may not utilize thiosulfate and were supported by a small set of SOB Notedly the isolates from high-salinity samples had strong and uniform sulfur-oxidizing ability Gammaproteobacteria including Pseudomonas Halomonas Marinobacter Thioalkalimicrobium and Mycobacterium were more likely to be enriched from these wetlands Of them Pseudomonas had the highest potential for denitrification in wastewater treatment In conclusion this study provided the information of microbial dynamics during SOB enrichment process

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chao-Li Huang (Supervisor)