Regular articleCharacterization of a microbial consortium capable of heterotrophic nitrifying under wide C/N range and its potential application in phenolic and coking wastewater

•A microbial consortium named FG-06 has excellent heterotrophic nitrifying-aerobic denitrifying ability.•It had good heterotrophic nitrifying ability under a wide C/N range.•Simultaneous removal of ammonia nitrogen and COD in phenolic wastewater and coking wastewater was achieved.•The predominant bacterial groups were identified as Acinetobacter spp. (54.37%) and Pseudomonas spp. (26.52%).

Nitrogen pollution has been a serious problem in environmental water particularly in industrial wastewater. A microbial consortium named FG-06 was found to exhibit efficient heterotrophic nitrification and aerobic denitrification ability, with the maximum NH4+-N, NO2−-N and NO3−-N removal rate of 7.33, 6.53 and 4.53 mg/L/h, respectively. High-throughput sequencing analysis showed that it was mainly made up of Acinetobacter spp. (54.37%) and Pseudomonas spp. (26.52%). The consortium could grow under a wide range of C/N ratio and the NH4+-N removal efficiencies at C/N ratio 4 and 32 were 90.40% and 93.84% separately. Furthermore, simultaneous biodegradation of NH4+-N and COD were achieved by inoculation with enriched consortium in synthetic phenolic wastewater and real coking wastewater samples. Results demonstrated that the consortium had high potential for further practical applications.