Feasibility Studies on Lab-Scale Ammonia Oxidizing Archaea/Anammox System for Nitrogen Removal

Nitrogen (N) pollution is one of the main nutrients of concern in water, and too much of it present in surface waters can cause eutrophication (Conley et al., 2009). As human population increases, the threat of nutrient pollution in our water resources increases simultaneously. Understanding and utilizing microbial contributors to the N cycle is key to nitrogen management. The first step in nitrification, oxidation of ammonia to nitrite, plays a significant role in the N cycle. A newly discovered microbe, Ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), has been reported to oxidize ammonia within a number of various environments suggesting that AOA could potentially contribute to a large portion of N removal that occurs naturally within the environment and perhaps be utilized in water treatment practices for removing nitrogen. However, there is limited research of AOA and thus the significance of its role in the global nitrogen cycle remains ambiguous. Exploration of AOA is required to determine the practicality of exploiting AOA in mainstream wastewater treatment. Here we substitute AOA for ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) in a partial nitritation/anammox (PN/A) lab-scale bioreactor to investigate the system’s feasibility of nitrogen removal.