Industrial wastewater facilities tend to treat wastes with highly variable flows and concentrations. As a result, these facilities tend to be difficult to operate and may have issues with settling, toxicity, and ammonia removal. Operators struggle to understand operational issues resulting from a lack of information on the bacteria responsible for these processes. Troubleshooting issues may consist of microscopy as well as checking pH, alkalinity, mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) and a lot of head scratching.

Fortunately new DNA technology enables users to see what is going on with the bacteria directly, rather than looking only at indicators and surrogate measurements. DNA technology finally can answer the most basic question: do I have the right bacteria growing?

DNA technologies are revolutionizing the way operators analyze activated sludge. These technologies have been decreasing in cost exponentially since the first human genome was published in 2001 at a cost of $3B USD. This figure shows how the cost of sequencing a human genome has dramatically fallen to just a couple thousand dollars today and will likely be $100 in a couple of years.

This same technology can be used to analyze activated sludge. And the price is similar to sending a sample for microscopic analysis of filaments. These technologies are economically feasible to identify and quantify nearly every microbe in a sample of wastewater using DNA.

Excerpted from WE&T July 2017, “Industrial Treatment Troubleshooting, DNA Can Help You” by Trevor Ghylin and Steve Leach. Read the entire article.

 (Posted 8/7/2017)

Historical cost of DNA sequencing ($ per human genome)

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