Treatment of Aquaculture Water Employing Fungi-Microalgae Consortium: Nutrients Removal Enhancement, Bacterial Communities Optimization, Emerging Contaminants Elimination, and Mechanism Analysis

Abstract

Fungi-microalgae consortium (FMC) is emerged as a promising system for advanced wastewater treatment with high biomass yield and environmental benefits. This study was conducted to investigate the nutrients removal, bacterial community shift, emerging contaminants elimination, and treatment mechanism of a FMC of Cordyceps militaris and Navicula seminulum for aquaculture pond water treatment. The fungi and microalgae were cultured and employed either alone or in combination to evaluate the treatment performance. The results demonstrated that the FMC could improve water quality more significantly by reducing nutrients pollution and optimizing the bacterial community structures, as well as exhibiting stronger positive correlation between the enrichment of functional bacteria with nutrient pollutants removal performance than the single-species treatments. Moreover, the FMC performed better in eliminating emerging contaminants (heavy metals, antibiotics, and pathogenic vibrios) than other groups. Superiorly, the FMC also showed greater symbiotic interactions and cooperative mechanisms for pollutants removal than single-species treatments.

Keywords: Fungi-microalgae consortium (FMC), Nutrients removal, Bacterial community compositions, Emerging contaminants elimination, Mechanism analysis.