Chapter 4 - Metagenomic analysis of wastewater microbiome signature: Methods, challenges, and their application in wastewater treatment

Abstract

Water contamination is an alarming situation for the developing countries due to a tremendous increase in industrialization. Contamination in water could be due to chemical pollutants or microbial communities. Although methods for the detection and treatment of chemical contaminants were well developed, the knowledge on the identification of microbial contaminants in wastewaters (WWs) is minimal because of the complexity of the WW microbiome. The identification of microbial communities in the WW is necessary for designing a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) to remove/reuse/recycle biological material. The core challenges in the identification of microbes in any chosen environment are lack of techniques available to mimic cultivation conditions and culturing the microbes using traditional microbiology methods. Metagenomics is an alternative method for the identification of individual microorganisms, including uncultivable microbes in the diverse microbial community in a single analysis. Due to the advancements in next generation sequencing (NGS) methods, metagenomic analysis has become a faster and cheaper approach for the characterization of microbiome present in a chosen environment. In this chapter we discuss the overview of metagenomics, sequencing methods, microbial ecology, and phylogenetics to directly identify and characterize the microbiome/microbial community present in the WW. Also, we discuss how metagenomics can improve WW treatment process design.