수도관 재질에 형성된 초기 생물막 형성 미생물의 군집 특성

Abstract

Annular Biofilm Reactor (ABR) equipped with coupons of three different pipe materials (STS 304, PVC, PE) was used to generate drinking water biofilm samples. The level of assimilable organic carbon (AOC) during the sample generation period was <TEX>$37.3{\mu}g/L$</TEX>, and this level did not seem to be low enough to limit the formation of biofilm in this study. Terminal-restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analyses determined T-RF profile as early as 3 h of exposure on PVC coupons. Average surface roughness (<TEX>$R_a$</TEX>) measured by atomic force microscopic analyses was 125.7 nm for PVC, and this value was higher than for STS (71.6 nm) and PE (74.0 nm). However, biofilm formation was faster on STS (6 h) than on PE (12 h), which indicated that surface roughness might not be the only factor that controlled the initiation of biofilm development. Upon detection of the T-RF peaks, richness (S) and diversity indices such as Shannon (H) and Simpson (1/D) demonstrated a rather slow increase until 48 h followed by rapid increase regardless of the pipe materials. Differences of microbial community structures among the biofilm samples were determined based on the cluster analysis using Jaccard coefficients (Sj). Biofilm communities could be divided into two distinct groups according to the exposure time regardless of the pipe materials. First group contained a young (< 48 h) biofilm samples (10 out of 11) but second group contained a mature (<TEX>${\geq}$</TEX> 48 h) samples (11 out of 14). Results suggested that, due to the complexity of biofilm, the targeting of the first group of cluster was crucial for optimizing the management of drinking water distribution systems and controlling microbial growth.