Metagenomic analysis of phosphorus removing sludge communities. Héctor García Martín1, Natalia Ivanova1, Victor Kunin1, Falk Warnecke1, Kerrie Barry1, Alice C. McHardy4, Christine Yeates2, Shaomei He3, Asaf Salamov1, Ernest Szeto1, Eileen Dalin1, Nik Putnam1, Harris J. Shapiro1, Jasmyn L. Pangilinan1, Isidore Rigoutsos4, Nikos C. Kyrpides1, Linda Louise Blackall2, Katherine D. McMahon3, and Philip Hugenholtz1* 1 DOE Joint Genome Institute, 2800 Mitchell Drive, Walnut Creek, CA 94598, USA. 2 Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, University of Queensland, St Lucia, 4072, Queensland, Australia. 3 Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of Wisconsin- Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA. 4 IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA *corresponding author:
[email protected] 1 Abstract Enhanced Biological Phosphorus Removal (EBPR) is not well understood at the metabolic level despite being one of the best-studied microbially-mediated industrial processes due to its ecological and economic relevance. Here we present a metagenomic analysis of two lab-scale EBPR sludges dominated by the uncultured bacterium, “Candidatus Accumulibacter phosphatis”. This analysis sheds light on several controversies in EBPR metabolic models and provides hypotheses explaining the dominance of A. phosphatis in this habitat, its lifestyle outside EBPR and probable cultivation requirements. Comparison of the same species from different EBPR sludges highlights recent evolutionary dynamics in the A. phosphatis genome that could be linked to mechanisms for environmental adaptation. In spite of an apparent lack of phylogenetic overlap in the flanking communities of the two sludges studied, common functional themes were found, at least one of them complementary to the inferred metabolism of the dominant organism.