Research Information System
International Microbiology, vol.28, no.8, pp.3161-3172, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Bacteriophages are major determinants of bacterial community dynamics. Industrial wastewaters constitute distinctive microbe–phage ecosystems shaped by heavy-metal and chemical stressors, yet they remain sparsely characterized by metagenomics. Most existing studies focus on municipal or hospital wastewaters, while phage and bacteriome communities in industrial effluents such as ceramic wastewater are largely unexplored. This study aimed to comprehensively characterize bacterial and phage communities in influent and effluent samples from a ceramic factory using metagenomic approaches. Phage DNA was sequenced on an Illumina NextSeq and processed with a standard bioinformatics pipeline for taxonomic and functional annotation. Of 657 million raw reads, 66% mapped to phage sequences. Caudovirales predominated, with Autographiviridae comprising 59% of classified viral reads. Functional annotation indicated that 64% of assigned genes encoded structural or replication functions. For the bacteriome, 16 S rRNA (V3–V4) amplicons were sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 and classified with Kraken2. Proteobacteria dominated both sample types, but community structure shifted along the treatment line: the influent was enriched in environmental-water genera—Flavobacterium (25%), Aeromonas (16%), and Acinetobacter (11%) —whereas the effluent was dominated by Flavobacterium (37%), Hydrogenophaga (25%), and Rhodoferax (14%). Genus-level richness contracted from 228 (influent) to 67 (effluent), and the number of reads entering taxonomic classification declined sharply (1,482,914 vs. 55,847), consistent with selective removal and physicochemical filtering during treatment. Collectively, these results demonstrate that ceramic wastewater harbors a distinct microbe–phage ecosystem molded by chemical and particulate stress. By illuminating an understudied industrial niche, this work provides actionable insights for wastewater treatment, environmental bioremediation, and microbial risk assessment.