Microbial Community Profiling in Wastewater of Effluent Treatment Plant

Summary

Effective wastewater treatment for the sludge disposal is required for environmental wellbeing as this may attribute to the toxic effects. Waste water released from municipal, hospital, and industrial premises pollute water, air, soil, and agricultural goods. Several companies employ effluent treatment plants (ETPs) to cleanse water and eliminate harmful or toxic contaminants or chemicals. ETPs are primarily unhygienic and require reprocessing to diminish water usage in industries. It is cost‐effective method and meet government‐set of standards for emission of environmental pollutants and supports sustainable development. Microorganism has significant role in the breakdown and remove organic and xenobiotic contaminants to purify wastewater in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). It is obligatory to recognize the microbial community of the wastewater and identify the strains that metabolize organic substances in order to develop an efficient biological wastewater treatment process. While classic methods such as coliform plate count are still used to monitor the microbial community in wastewater, more advanced technologies such as DNA sequencing may be used to detect additional potentially dangerous microbes that fail to grow on traditional growth media. In addition to DNA sequencing, RNA sequencing may aid in the detection of active microbes in wastewater or biomass digestion systems. Bioaerosols produced during wastewater treatment could represent a health risk to workers of these plants. In some parts of the world, using wastewater and excreta in agriculture is a prevalent practice that can lead to significant diseases such as diarrhea, skin infection, parasite infection, and bacterial infection. This chapter discusses the various characterization and identification methods of microbial communities of WWTPs. It also covered microbial community profiling, identification, and selection in WWTPs and give a thorough perspective of the whole microbial population of a WWTP utilizing 16S rRNA gene sequencing, metagenomic, and metatranscriptomic sequencing. Following that, this chapter also gives a detail overview of infectious and nonspecific diseases produced by the microbial community in employees working in waste water treatment plant.