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Using cassava distiller’s dried grains as carbon and microbe sources to enhance denitrification of nitrate-contaminated groundwater

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Nitrate removal from synthetic and real groundwater was investigated by using cassava distiller’s dried grains (CDDG), which served as sole carbon source as well as the only microbe seed. It was found that remarkably higher total nitrogen removal efficiency (96.8±0.6 %) could be reached; the accumulation of nitrite and the releases of organic compounds, meanwhile, were insignificant in the denitrification process. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis showed that CDDG were degraded during the denitrification process. Further investigation showed that CDDG were anaerobically hydrolyzed and acidified to butyric acid, acetic acid, and carbohydrate, which could be utilized directly as the reducing equivalent providers for denitrification by the microorganisms separated from CDDG. Microbial community analysis revealed that the fungi and bacteria present in the original CDDG functioned as the denitrifiers, which mainly consisted of Aspergillus (69.8 %) and Rhizomucor (15.9 %) in the fungi community and Burkholderia (20.6 %) and Rhizobium (15.9 %) in the bacteria community, respectively. Finally, the use of CDDG as both carbon and microbial sources for real groundwater denitrification was testified to be feasible and safe with a total nitrogen removal efficiency of around 100 %.

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Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program (2011AA060903) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (51178324, 51278354, and 41301558).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Rui Wan, Xiong Zheng, Yinguang Chen & Huaichen Wang

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  1. Rui Wan
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  2. Xiong Zheng
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  3. Yinguang Chen
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  4. Huaichen Wang
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Correspondence to Xiong Zheng or Yinguang Chen.

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Wan, R., Zheng, X., Chen, Y. et al. Using cassava distiller’s dried grains as carbon and microbe sources to enhance denitrification of nitrate-contaminated groundwater. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 99, 2839–2847 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-6155-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-014-6155-z

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