A New Perspective on Microbiome and Resource Management in Wastewater Systems

Wastewater treatment systems are predominantly based on biological processes that in principle derive energy from biochemical reactions involving substrate degradation available in the raw waste. The most commonly used technologies are suspended medium (activated sludge process), and attached growth or biofilm based technologies (tricking filters). In these processes, the key players responsible for environmental remediation are the prokaryotic microorganisms that live in communities. The key for optimizing these biological processes is by understanding the microbial ecology of the diverse populations in these systems and formulating appropriate tools of environmental biotechnology to predict their functional roles and their responses to the environmental stress. Environmental biotechnology plays an important role in developing sustainable wastewater treatment systems. This field demands knowledge on microbial ecology to identify the key players and maximize their populations by providing the optimum conditions while mitigating the competitors and other predator species and maintaining the robustness in microbial community structure to promote resilience during environmental stress. With wastewater treatment systems being increasingly recognized as resource (energy, nutrients and water) recovery facilities, the role of microbiome and resource management is crucial for sustainable process development. Recent developments in molecular biology tools such as meta-omics have enhanced our ability to better understand these biological processes. Much greater discoveries or discovery-driven experimental planning and analytical approaches are needed to develop robust and resilient environmental systems. This mini-review focuses on the use of meta-omic tools to understand wastewater microbiology and potential integrated approaches for simultaneous and simple yet reliable analysis of the microbial systems in anaerobic digestion and microbial fuel cell systems which share several common features of the ability to produce energy and other valuable chemical and energy products under anaerobic conditions with complex microbial ecology.