The responses of marine anammox bacteria-based microbiome to multi-antibiotic stress in mariculture wastewater treatment

Abstract

Saline mariculture wastewater containing multi-antibiotics poses a challenge to anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox) process. Herein, the halophilic marine anammox bacteria (MAB)-based microbiome was used for treating mariculture wastewater (35‰ salinity) under multi-antibiotics (enrofloxacin + oxytetracycline + sulfamethoxazole, EOS) stress. And the main focus of this study lies in the response of MAB-based microbiome against multi-antibiotics stress. It is found that MAB-based microbiome shows stable community structure and contributes high nitrogen removal efficiency (>90%) even under high stress of EOS (up to 4 mg·L−1). The relative abundance of main functional genus Candidatus Scalindua, responsible for anammox, had little change while controlling the influent EOS concentration within 4 mg·L−1, whereas, significantly decreased to 2.23% at EOS concentration of as high as 24 mg·L−1. As an alternative, antibiotic resistance bacteria (ARB) species Rheinheimera dominated the microbial community of MAB-based biological reactor under extremely high EOS stress (e.g. 24 mg·L−1 in influent). The response mechanism of MAB-based microbiome consists of extracellular and intracellular defenses with dependence of EOS concentration. For example, while EOS within 4 mg·L−1 in this study, most of the antibiotics were retained by extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) via adsorption; If increasing the EOS concentration to 8 and even 24 mg·L−1, part of antibiotics could intrude into the cells and cause the intracellular accumulation of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) (total abundance up to 2.44 × 10−1 copies/16S rRNA) for EOS response. These new understandings will facilitate the practical implementation of MAB-based bioprocess for saline nitrogen- and antibiotics-laden wastewater treatment.