Issue 8, 2023

Emerging investigator series: the role of phage lifestyle in wastewater microbial community structures and functions: insights into diverse microbial environments

Abstract

For over a century, environmental engineers have attempted to control the prokaryotic community biological wastewater treatment processes, but there is growing interest in both understanding and harnessing the activity of phages in wastewater bioprocesses. While phages are known to be present and abundant, their ecological role, potential benefits, and impacts on wastewater biological processes are not fully understood. Fundamental knowledge on how phages infect host cells from relatively simple pure culture studies alongside environmental studies from marine and soil systems can be used to predict the potential impact of phages in diverse and dynamic wastewater environments. This frontier review is focused on what is known about the molecular mechanisms by which phages infect bacteria and how that could apply to biological process control and operation within wastewater treatment systems. Here, we specifically focus on highlights from studies on the molecular mechanisms that drive lysis and lysogeny within phage cells and the impacts on the dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes and nutrient removal within a biological wastewater process.

Graphical abstract: Emerging investigator series: the role of phage lifestyle in wastewater microbial community structures and functions: insights into diverse microbial environments

Article information

Article type
Frontier
Submitted
30 sen 2022
Accepted
05 apr 2023
First published
02 iyn 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol., 2023,9, 1982-1991

Emerging investigator series: the role of phage lifestyle in wastewater microbial community structures and functions: insights into diverse microbial environments

J. Delgado Vela and M. Al-Faliti, Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol., 2023, 9, 1982 DOI: 10.1039/D2EW00755J

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements