A drinking water microbiome from source to tap: Community diversity, functionality, and microbial interaction
type: CreativeWork
description: Despite the long history of water research, understanding drinking water microbiome continuum spanning from source water, treatment in the production process, distribution network, and up to the point where water enters a building is rather challenging owing to the complexity in community assembly, water matrices, physical structure, and chemical gradients from source to tap. Previous studies on drinking water microbiomes have primarily investigated “who are there” and “how do they change over time and across space” in selected stages of drinking water systems. However, it is important to ask additional questions that include but are not limited to “what are they doing?”, “why are they there?” and more critically “who is doing what?”, and “what are the interrelationships among them, and between them and their environment?”. To answer these questions, it requires not only the advent of new methods, but also the transformation of drinking water microbiology from a descriptive discipline to a hypothesis-driven science that attempts to elucidate mechanisms with the intention to predict and shape the microbiome continuum. The studies included in this dissertation resolved the ecological patterns of a groundwater-sourced drinking water microbiome at different scales. At the community level, the treatment process could be viewed as ecological disturbances on the drinking water microbiome continuum over space in the system by combining 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and metagenomics. Abstraction caused a substantial decrease in both the abundance and number of functional genes related to methanogenesis and syntrophs in raw water. The softening process reduced microbial diversity and selected an Exiguobacterium-related population, which was attributed to its ability to use the phosphotransferase system (PTS) as regulatory machinery to control the energy conditions of the cell. After disinfection and entering the distribution system, microbial populations and their functio…
abstract: Despite the long history of water research, understanding drinking water microbiome continuum spanning from source water, treatment in the production process, distribution network, and up to the point where water enters a building is rather challenging owing to the complexity in community assembly, water matrices, physical structure, and chemical gradients from source to tap. Previous studies on drinking water microbiomes have primarily investigated “who are there” and “how do they change over time and across space” in selected stages of drinking water systems. However, it is important to ask additional questions that include but are not limited to “what are they doing?”, “why are they there?” and more critically “who is doing what?”, and “what are the interrelationships among them, and between them and their environment?”. To answer these questions, it requires not only the advent of new methods, but also the transformation of drinking water microbiology from a descriptive discipline to a hypothesis-driven science that attempts to elucidate mechanisms with the intention to predict and shape the microbiome continuum. The studies included in this dissertation resolved the ecological patterns of a groundwater-sourced drinking water microbiome at different scales. At the community level, the treatment process could be viewed as ecological disturbances on the drinking water microbiome continuum over space in the system by combining 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and metagenomics. Abstraction caused a substantial decrease in both the abundance and number of functional genes related to methanogenesis and syntrophs in raw water. The softening process reduced microbial diversity and selected an Exiguobacterium-related population, which was attributed to its ability to use the phosphotransferase system (PTS) as regulatory machinery to control the energy conditions of the cell. After disinfection and entering the distribution system, microbial populations and their functio…
author: Zhang, Ya
language: en
keywords: drinking water microbiome, microbial interaction
date published: 2018-09-27T16:45:27Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:40Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101742