Abstract:
Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) allows the reuse of water after biofiltration. In this system, nitrifying bacteria attached on the biofilter material as biofilm could effectively eliminate ammonia and nitrite in the wastewater. Previous studies found that most nitrifying bacteria are unculturable. Thus, the purposes of this study were to develop a process for cultivation and isolation of the nitrifying bacteria from RAS biofilter obtained from the Center of Excellence for Marine Biotechnology, Chulalongkorn University. At first, nitrifying bacteria were pre-cultured for 3 months in a medium containing 90 mg/l shrimp food and 100 mg/l (NH4)2SO4. Plastic matrices (BCN-009) were also added to increase the surface area for attachment by these bacteria. The result from scanning electron microscope (SEM) showed many groups of bacteria in these matrices. Then, the matrices with nitrifying bacteria were transferred daily into a similar medium but vary the amount of NH4-N to 2, 5, and 10 ppm. The nitrifying activity could completely reduce NH4-N concentrations within a day. Community of nitrifying bacteria was studied by Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) with CTO189f-gc and CTO654r primers. DGGE profiles of the cultivated ammonia oxidizing bacteria were similar to the profile from the RAS biofilter sample. Nucleotide analysis identified the dominant populations in both samples as Uncultured Nitrosomonas sp. Moreover, these cultured bacteria could reduce ammonia at the initial concentration of 5 mg/l in both synthetic wastewater and real wastewater within 20 hours. The maximum rate of ammonia degradation from these cultured bacteria was 67.9 mg-N/m2/h. In addition, these cultured bacteria were still effective for ammonia reduction after storage for 1 week at 4o C. The bacteria could be re-cultivated and maintained in the same medium. From the results, we can conclude that this process was suitable for the culture of nitrifying bacteria, which can be used as inoculum for wastewater treatment in the recirculating aquaculture system.