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Credit: Quanli Man, Peilian Zhang, Weiqi Huang, Qing Zhu, Xiaoling He, Dongsheng Wei

Nitrogen in hypersaline wastewater produced by various industries causes severe threat to the aqueous environment, and the accumulation of ammonia nitrogen often results in excessive multiplication of algae and leads to decrease of dissolved oxygen and the death of higher organisms. Meanwhile, the nitrite and nitrosamine in water serious threat to health and life safety of human, animal and microbes. Accordingly, it is urgent that removal nitrogen from high-salinity wastewater.

The bacteria capable of Heterotrophic nitrification and aerobic denitrification (HN-AD) not only provides excellent solution to remove nitrogen from different wastewater, but also save floor space and operation costs of sewage treatment plant. However, either some HN-AD bacteria are not suitable for hypersaline environments, or reported salt-tolerant bacteria only show considerable nitrification ability but low denitrification ability under high-salinity condition and are not appropriate for high-nitrogen concentration. Therefore, how to deal with the wastewater containing high salinity and nitrogen concentration before discharging it into environment?    

To address this problem, Prof. He from Tiangong University, Prof. Wei from Nankai University, Dr. Man Tiangong University and their team members have worked jointly and investigated systematically the nitrogen removal performance of H. venusta TJPU05 isolated from the sediment of Salt Lake in simulated water with sole or mixed nitrogen sources and in actual wastewater with high concentration of salt and nitrogen. Their work not only demonstrated the H. venusta TJPU05 processes excellent potential in treating high-salinity nitrogenous wastewater, but also provides a promising microorganism resource for denitrification from hypersaline wastewater with high nitrogen. This study entitled “A heterotrophic nitrification-aerobic denitrification bacterium Halomonas venusta TJPU05 suitable for nitrogen removal from high-salinity wastewater” is published online in Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering in 2022.

In this study, the research team isolated a novel salt-tolerant HN-AD bacterium, Halomonas venusta TJPU05, from the sediment of Salt Lake, which showed excellent HN-AD ability in simulated water (SW) and actual wastewater (AW) with high concentration of salt and nitrogen. They concluded that 86.12% of NH4+-N, 95.68% of NO3–-N, 100% of NO2–-N and 84.57% of total nitrogen (TN) could be removed from SW with sole nitrogen sources within 24 h at the utmost. And H. venusta TJPU05 could maximally remove 84.06% of NH4+-N, 92.33% of NO3–-N, 92.9% of NO2–-N and 77.73% of TN from SW with mixed nitrogen source when the salinity was above 8%. The application of H. venusta TJPU05 in treating AW with high salt and high ammonia nitrogen resulted in removal efficiencies of 50.96%, 47.28% and 43.19% for NH4+-N, NO3–-N and TN respectively without any optimization. Furthermore, the highest activities of ammonia oxygenase, hydroxylamine oxidase, nitrate reductase and nitrite reductase enzymes were obtained at the salinity of 5% and 8%, respectively.

This study isolated a novel salt-tolerant heterotrophic nitrification and aerobic denitrification bacterium H. venusta TJPU05 and demonstrated the H. venusta TJPU05 has enormous potential in treating high-salinity nitrogenous wastewater. At the same time, this research provides a very promising microorganism resource in the field of removal of nitrogen from hypersaline actual wastewater.

Founded in May 1954, Higher Education Press Limited Company (HEP), affiliated with the Ministry of Education, is one of the earliest institutions committed to educational publishing after the establishment of P. R. China in 1949. After striving for six decades, HEP has developed into a major comprehensive publisher, with products in various forms and at different levels. Both for import and export, HEP has been striving to fill in the gap of domestic and foreign markets and meet the demand of global customers by collaborating with more than 200 partners throughout the world and selling products and services in 32 languages globally. Now, HEP ranks among China's top publishers in terms of copyright export volume and the world's top 50 largest publishing enterprises in terms of comprehensive strength.

The Frontiers Journals series published by HEP includes 28 English academic journals, covering the largest academic fields in China at present. Among the series, 13 have been indexed by SCI, 6 by EI, 2 by MEDLINE, 1 by A&HCI. HEP's academic monographs have won about 300 different kinds of publishing funds and awards both at home and abroad.

About Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering

Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering (FESE) is the leading edge forum for peer-reviewed original submissions in English on all main branches of environmental disciplines. FESE welcomes original research papers, review articles, short communications, and views & comments. All the papers will be published within 6 months since they are submitted. The Editors-in-Chief are Prof. Jiuhui Qu from Tsinghua University, and Prof. John C. Crittenden from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. The journal has been indexed by almost all the authoritative databases such as SCI, Ei, INSPEC, SCOPUS, CSCD, etc.

Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering

A heterotrophic nitrification-aerobic denitrification bacterium Halomonas venusta TJPU05 suitable for nitrogen removal from high-salinity wastewater

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Copyright © 2022 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Copyright © 2022 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)