Microbiomes and Pollutant Biotransformation at Critical Nodes of the Urban Water Cycle: Implications for Ecological Safety and Human Health
A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Water and One Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 January 2027 | Viewed by 76
Editors
Interests: environmental biotechnology; wastewater treatment; high-risk pollutants; biodegrada-tion; synthetic biology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: microbial ecology; microbial nitrogen cycle; wastewater treatment; meta-omics; biolog-ical nutrient removal
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Urban water systems connect source waters, drinking water treatment and distribution, wastewater treatment plants, reclaimed water, and receiving environments. At these critical nodes, microbial communities interact continuously with nutrients, pathogens, antibiotic resistance genes, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, antibiotics, disinfection by-products, microplastics, and other emerging contaminants. These interactions regulate pollutant degradation, transformation product formation, microbial risk propagation, and the ecological and human health safety of urban water cycles.
Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, isotope probing, cultivation-based approaches, and process modeling provide new opportunities to link microbial community structure with ecological functions, pollutant fate, and health-related risks. However, key knowledge gaps remain in identifying functional microorganisms, resolving degradation pathways, clarifying metabolic mechanisms, and translating mechanistic understanding into water quality monitoring, risk control, and process optimization.
This Special Issue welcomes original research articles, reviews, and case studies on microbiomes, pollutants, and microbial degradation mechanisms across critical nodes of the urban water cycle. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Microbial community characteristics and ecological functions in source water, drinking water systems, wastewater treatment plants, reclaimed water, and receiving waters.
- Fate, degradation, and transformation of conventional and emerging pollutants in urban water systems.
- Health-related microorganisms, opportunistic pathogens, antibiotic resistance genes, and microbial risk transmission.
- Isolation, identification, and bioaugmentation of pollutant-degrading bacteria and microbial consortia.
- Metabolic traits, functional genes, enzymes, and molecular mechanisms involved in pollutant biodegradation.
- Formation, toxicity, and ecological risks of transformation products.
- Omics-based, isotope-based, and modeling approaches for linking microbial communities with pollutant transformation.
- Microbial monitoring and risk control strategies for ecological safety and human health protection.
Dr. Xiwei He
Dr. Depeng Wang
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- urban water cycle
- water microbiome
- microbial community
- pollutant biotransformation
- emerging contaminants
- drinking water
- wastewater treatment
- degradation bacteria
- antibiotic resistance genes
- ecological safety
- human health
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