ArticleMicrobiome2021
Urban wastewater bacterial communities assemble into seasonal steady states.
Article in Microbiome, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Building-Scale Wastewater Metagenomics Reveals Temporal Patterns in Resistance and Virulence Genes.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Citywide metagenomics reveals microbial community and resistome dynamics in urban wastewater.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Exploring community-level gut health amidst COVID-19 pandemic: a proposed application of longitudinal wastewater surveillance.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2026Article
- Recovery and Survival of Prototheca Microalgae During Wastewater Treatment Process.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Article
- Highly Resolved Community Sewage Metagenomics Unveiling Landscape and Transmission Patterns of Antibiotic Resistome in Hong Kong Populations.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Environmental reservoirs account for high levels of carbapenem resistance genes in wastewater.Microbiology spectrum · 2026Article
- Catching the Mardi Gras fever: Quantifying the impact of mass gathering tourism on local bacterial prevalence and community diversity in municipal wastewater.Research square · 2026Article
- High-throughput sequencing reveals the virome characteristics of wastewater in Gansu Province, China from 2024 to 2026.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Urban wastewater and sewage sludge as environmental sources of antimicrobial resistance, potential pathogens, and selective agents: insights from three European wastewater treatment plants.Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Agricultural land use shapes short and long‑term bacterial diversity, community structure, and assembly in biofilms of adjacent streams.Environmental microbiome · 2025Article
- Deciphering Soil Keystone Microbial Taxa: Structural Diversity and Co-Occurrence Patterns from Peri-Urban to Urban Landscapes.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Lima Megacity's Influence on Aquatic Microbial Communities in the Rímac River: Dominance Over Spatial and Seasonal Variations.Microbial ecology · 2025Article
- Distinguishing critical microbial community shifts from normal temporal variability in human and environmental ecosystems.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Sewer microbiomes shape microbial community composition and dynamics of wastewater treatment plants.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Time-series sewage metagenomics distinguishes seasonal, human-derived and environmental microbial communities potentially allowing source-attributed surveillance.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Seasonality of respiratory, enteric, and urinary viruses revealed by wastewater genomic surveillance.mSphere · 2024Article
- Effects of operational parameters on bacterial communities in Hong Kong and global wastewater treatment plants.mSystems · 2024Article
- Wastewater-based surveillance as a tool for public health action: SARS-CoV-2 and beyond.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2024Review
- Microbial entropy change and external dissipation process of urban sewer ecosystem.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2024Article
- Phytoextraction Options.Advances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMicroorganisms in urban sanitary sewers exhibit community properties that suggest sewers are a novel ecosystem. Sewer microorganisms present both an opportunity as a control point for wastewater treatment and a risk to human health. If treatment processes are to be improved and health risks quantified, then it is necessary to understand microbial distributions and dynamics within this community. Here, we use 16S rRNA gene sequencing to characterize raw influent wastewater bacterial communities in a 5-year time series from two wastewater treatment plants in Milwaukee, WI; influent wastewater from 77 treatment plants across the USA; and wastewater in 12 Milwaukee residential sewers.
resultsIn Milwaukee, we find that in transit from residences to treatment plants, the human bacterial component of wastewater decreases in proportion and exhibits stochastic temporal variation. In contrast, the resident sewer community increases in abundance during transit and cycles seasonally according to changes in wastewater temperature. The result is a bacterial community that assembles into two distinct community states each year according to the extremes in wastewater temperature. Wastewater bacterial communities from other northern US cities follow temporal trends that mirror those in Milwaukee, but southern US cities have distinct community compositions and differ in their seasonal patterns.
conclusionsOur findings provide evidence that environmental conditions associated with seasonal change and climatic differences related to geography predictably structure the bacterial communities residing in below-ground sewer pipes. Video abstract.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.