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Co-impacts of the microplastic polyamide and sertraline on the denitrification function and microbial community structure in SBRs

The Science of The Total Environment 2022 7 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 40 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Boming Fu, Jingyang Luo, Runze Xu, Fang Fang, Qian Feng, Teng Zhang, Eunju Yang, Jiashun Cao

Summary

Researchers found that combining polyamide microplastics with the antidepressant sertraline in sequencing batch reactors significantly impaired nitrogen removal and disrupted microbial community structure in activated sludge, with stronger negative effects observed when the two pollutants were present simultaneously.

Polymers

The co-impacts of microplastics (MPs) and organic pollutants on activated sludge have attracted extensive attention. In this study, microplastic polyamide (PA) and sertraline (SER) were respectively or simultaneously added to sequencing batch reactors (SBRs), and the impacts of these pollutants on activated sludge were investigated. The results showed that NH-N and TN removal efficiencies significantly decreased with the simultaneous adding of the two pollutants. The coexistence of PA and SER could observably decrease the settling ability of activated sludge, and more proteins and polysaccharides were generated to reduce the combined toxicity. The microbial diversity, especially the denitrification microorganism, was restrained and the metabolic function and the key enzyme involved in nitrogen metabolism pathways were observably decreased, due to the combined toxicity of this two pollutants. Furthermore, the effective SER interception by PA in SBR could induce the SER enrichment in activated sludge and enhance the biotoxicity toward sludge microorganisms.

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