Earth & Environmental Sciences

Improvement of the stability of functional microbial communities in wastewater treatment system is critical to accelerate pollutants detoxification in cold regions. Although biocathode communities could accelerate environmental pollutants degradation, how to acclimate the cold stress and to improve the catalytic stability of functional microbial communities are remain poorly understood. Here we investigated the structural and functional responses of antibiotic chloramphenicol (CAP) reducing biocathode communities to constant low temperature 10 °C (10-biocathode) and temperature elevation from 10 °C to 25 °C (S25-biocathode). Our results indicated that the low temperature acclimation with electrical stimulation obviously enhanced the CAP nitro group reduction efficiency when comparing the aromatic amine product AMCl2 formation efficiency with the 10-biocathode and S25-biocathode under the opened and closed circuit conditions. The 10-biocathode generated comparative AMCl maximum as the S25-biocathode but showed significant lower dehalogenation rate of AMCl2 to AMCl. The continuous low temperature and temperature elevation both enriched core functional community in the 10-biocathode and S25-biocathode, respectively. The 10-biocathode functioning stability maintained mainly through selectively enriching cold-adapted functional species, coexisting metabolically similar nitroaromatics reducers and maintaining the relative abundance of key electrons transfer genes. This study provides new insights into biocathode functioning stability for accelerating environmental pollutants degradation in cold wastewater system.