Effects of transient temperature conditions on the divergence of activated sludge bacterial community structure and function

The effect of temperature fluctuations on bacterial community structure and function in lab-scale sequencing batch reactors treating bleached kraft mill effluent was investigated. An increase in temperature from 30 to 45 °C caused shifts in both bacterial community structure and function. Triplicate reactors were highly similar for 40 days following startup. After the temperature shift, their community structure and function started to diverge from each other and from the control. A multi-response permutation procedure confirmed that the variability in community structure between transient and control reactors were greater than that among the triplicate transient reactors. The fact that these disturbances manifest themselves in different ways in apparently identical reactors suggests a high degree of variability between replicate systems.