Biological Nitrogen Removal Database: A Manually Curated Data Resource

Abstract

Biological nitrogen removal (BNR) technologies are the most effective approaches for the remediation of environmental nitrogen pollutants from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Presently, research is going on to elucidate the structure and function of BNR microbial communities and optimizing BNR treatment systems to enhance nitrogen removal efficiency. The literature on BNR microbial communities and experimental datasets is not unified across various repositories, while a uniform resource for the collection, annotation, and structuring of these BNR datasets is still unavailable. Herein, we present the Biological Nitrogen Removal Database (BNRdb), an integrated resource containing various manually curated BNR-related data. At present, BNRdb contains 23,308 microbial strains, 46 gene families, 24 enzymes, 18 reactions, 301 BNR treatment datasets, 860 BNR-associated next-generation sequencing datasets, and 6 common BNR bioreactor systems. BNRdb provides a user-friendly interface enabling interactive data browsing. To our knowledge, BNRdb is the first BNR data resource that systematically integrates BNR data from archaeal, bacterial, and fungal communities. We believe that BNRdb will contribute to a better understanding of BNR process and nitrogen bioremediation research.

Keywords: biological nitrogen removal; bioreactor systems; data resource; microbial communities; wastewater treatment plants.

Figure 1

Construction, content, and interface of BNRdb. Data were collected from published literature and databases and curated into six categories. BNRdb provides a user-friendly interface to query, browse, analyze, and download detailed information about these data sets.

Figure 2

Statistics of nitrogen-removing microbes in BNRdb. (a) The distribution of microbial strains (see in Table S3) in BNRdb. (b) Distribution of microbial strains identified based on functional gene analysis. (c) Distribution of microbial strains identified based on either 16S rRNA gene analysis or functional screening studies.

Figure 3

Overview of the BNRdb user interface to access data. (a) Users can input the GenBank ID accession number for querying and filtering. For example, accession “DQ518208.1”. (b) The returned search result can be further explored by clicking the link to access the detailed information. (c) The comprehensive information of the denitrifying microbial strain.