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Industrial Microbiology 2016
October 17-18, 2016
Volume 8, Issue 5(Suppl) J Microb Biochem Technol
ISSN:1948-5948 JMBT, an open access journal
conferenceseries .com
October 17-18, 2016 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Industrial & Pharmaceutical MicrobiologyInternational Conference and Summit on
Deborah Patsch, J Microb Biochem Technol 2016, 8:5(Suppl)
The importance of biodiversity on the functional performance of wastewater treatment plants
Deborah Patsch
EAWAG & ETHZ, Switzerland
Microbial communities perform functions that provide crucial services to ecosystems and human society in wastewater
they detoxify pollutants and consume environmental nutrients, thus mitigating the potentially deleterious effects of these
chemicals on ecosystems and human health. However the role of community composition and biodiversity to perform these
functions has not been clearly understood. We are therefore addressing a critical and unresolved ecological question: When
are community composition and biodiversity important for the provision of a particular ecosystem function and when are they
not? We hypothesize that community composition and biodiversity are more important for rare ecosystem functions than for
common ecosystem functions. If an ecosystem function is rare, then differences or changes in community composition could
have profound effects on the biotransformation rate of that function. In contrast, if an ecosystem function is common, then
differences or changes in community composition are unlikely to have an effect on that function. We addressed this knowledge
gap with an extensive study, measuring the kinetics of 95 different ecosystem functions for 35 different wastewater treatment
plant communities. We then correlated their performance with their taxonomic and functional biodiversity levels, which were
determined through metagenomic and metatranscriptomic approaches.
Biography
Deborah Patsch has completed her Bachelors in Molecular Biology at the University of Graz, Austria and completed her Master’s studies at Southern Illinois
University of Carbondale, USA. She is currently pursuing PhD as a Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich and Eawag where she focuses her research on microbial
ecology related topics.