Understanding and advancing wastewater treatment.

In bioreactors used for the purification of wastewater, microorganisms are active in biofilms or aggregates. Insight into the factors that determine the structure and function of aggregated biomass is increasing steadily. Besides conventional techniques, modem molecular techniques are used increasingly to get a better understanding of the complex microbial communities in wastewater treatment systems. In recent years, the combined use of these techniques has led to a good insight into the population dynamics of different types of microbes in bioreactors.