Metagenomic insights into drinking water microbiome

Dai, Zihan (2020) Metagenomic insights into drinking water microbiome. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

As the final barrier to protect consumers from contamination and unwanted microbial growth, drinking water distribution system is crucial for the supply of potable and high- quality drinking water. The microbial community migrating from drinking water treatment plant (DWTP) to the customers’ tap through drinking water distribution system (DWDS) is abundant and diverse, with a cell concentration of 106 to 108 per liter and comprising of microorganism affiliated with bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and viruses. DNA sequencing based approaches have become affordable and accessible owing to the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technology. Our current understanding regarding the composition and structure of drinking water microbiome can largely be attributed to 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, however, the inherent limitation of this method, only targeting marker gene, results in the lack of the direct linkage between phylogeny and functional capacity of drinking water microbiome. In this research project, we focused on the investigation of microbial communities in the full-scale drinking water distribution systems using metagenomics approaches, a more comprehensive method sequencing the whole genomic content in the environmental samples, to extend the current understanding of drinking water microbiome. First, the impacts of two distinct disinfection strategies (maintaining disinfectant residuals in the DWDS or not) were assessed in the aspects of community structure, metabolic traits, as well as population genomes of drinking water microbiomes. Metagenomes and metagenome-assembled genomes analyses indicated that disinfectant residual formed a conserved selective pressure on the membership, structure and functional potentials of microbial communities in the DWDSs, regardless of the system-to-system variations of the included samples. Moreover, we speculated that disinfection might promoted necrotrophic growth from disinfection inactivated cells.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: Drinking water microbiome, metagenomics.
• Subjects: T Technology > T Technology (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
• Supervisor's Name: Ijaz, Dr. Umer and Pinto, Dr. Ameet
• Date of Award: 2020
• Embargo Date: 29 April 2023
• Depositing User: Zihan Dai
• Unique ID: glathesis:2020-81323
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 05 May 2020 15:02
• Last Modified: 11 May 2020 09:25
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/81323

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