I will be presenting Chris and I’s research exploring nutrient uptake dynamics within HDBRs at the ACS National Meeting in New Orleans, LA. The presentation is within the ENVR (Environmental Chemistry) Division, and will occur at 1:25 pm on Wednesday March 21st. I will post more information regarding the session location as it becomes available. Title and abstract after the break…

Title:
Examining nutrient uptake and transformation within photosynthetic microbial communities using a high density bioreactor

Jacob R. Price and Christopher M. Sales

Abstract:
Anthropogenic nutrient sources such as wastewater treatment and untreated agricultural animal waste contribute to a large number of environmental and ecological disturbances, such as eutrophication. Applying engineered resource recovery systems, using photosynthetic microbial communities, provides a way to intercept high nutrient fluxes before their deleterious effects are realized, while also creating valuable byproducts (i.e., clean water and nutrient rich biomass). In this presentation we will describe the use of a unique reactor architecture, called a high density bioreactor (HDBR), which is capable of continuous production of bacterial-algal biomass grown on wastewater, to study the uptake and transformation of organic carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous within an algae- and cyanobacteria-dominated photosynthetic microbial community, as well as how changes in influent composition affects microbial community composition and its impact on reactor kinetics. At the lab scale, the HDBR has been demonstrated to remove a significant proportion of nutrients while simultaneously cultivating high density biomass for use as feedstock for the potential production of biofuels or fertilizer. Reactors were sampled daily for kinetic performance and microbial community samples were subjected to amplicon sequencing, targeting 16S rDNA, for each experimental condition. We will present preliminary results demonstrating how analyzing this data using numerical ecology techniques including hierarchical clustering and ordination can be applied to explore both kinetic and molecular ecology datasets simultaneously and to garner useful information to better model, engineer, and operate these systems.