Biodiversity

Biography

Biography: Maulin P Shah

Abstract

An industrial wastewater treatment plant receives wastewater with high concentrations of ammonia was investigated by using a polyphasic approach. For fine-scale molecular analysis of ammonia-oxidizing population, one partial stretch of the gene encoding the active site of the polypeptide of ammonia mono oxygenase (amoA) was amplified from total DNA extracted from the ammonia oxidizer isolates and from activated sludge. But comparative sequence analysis of 13 sequences from the clones’ amoA activated sludge shown that these sequences were very similar to the corresponding amoA fragments of Nitrosomonas europaea Nm50 and N. mobilis isolate. The unexpected high sequence similarity between amoA gene fragments mobilis isolate of Nitrobacter and N. europaea indicates a possible lateral gene transfer event. Although a Nitrobacter strain was isolated, members of nitrite-oxidizing genus Nitrobacter was not detectable in the activated slurry by in situ hybridization. Therefore, we used rRNA approach to study the abundance of other well known nitrite-oxidizing bacterial genera. Three different methods were used for DNA extraction from activated sludge. For each DNA preparation, almost full length genes encoding small subunit rRNA was separately amplified and used to generate three libraries 16S rDNA. Comparative sequence analysis 2 of 60 randomly selected clones could be attributed to the nitrite-oxidizing bacteria of the genus Nitrospira. Based on These clones were sequences specific 16S rRNA-targeted probe is developed. FISH of the activated sludge with this probe showed that the Nitrospira-like bacteria were present in large numbers (9% of total bacterial counter) and often took place in co-aggregated micro colonies with N. mobilis.