DNA Based Diversity Analysis of Microorganisms in Industrial Cooling Towers

摘要

Effective microbial control in cooling systems is necessary to ensure system cleanliness and avoid fouling that degrades cooling system performance, promotes corrosion and favors growth of pathogens. However, controlling organisms optimally involves an understanding of the identity of the population of microbes in a system due to the varying susceptibilities of organisms to biocides. This is a challenging task with standard culturing techniques which only allow for a small fraction of the total population to be cultured and identified. In this study, 16s rDNA was employed to maximize the population identification of 40 different independent cooling tower samples. Many of the samples included pair planktonic and sessile samples from the same location. The analysis yielded over 282,000 sequences which corresponded to over 1,700 different taxa, demonstrating extensive diversity not only from remote locations but also within locations of close proximity. This shows that a wide variety of biocides are needed to address microbial populations.