Biological Nitrogen Removal Database: A Manually Curated Data Resource

Abstract

Biological nitrogen removal (BNR) technologies are the most effective approaches for the remediation of environmental nitrogen pollutants from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Presently, research is going on to elucidate the structure and function of BNR microbial communities and optimizing BNR treatment systems to enhance nitrogen removal efficiency. The literature on BNR microbial communities and experimental datasets is not unified across various repositories, while a uniform resource for the collection, annotation, and structuring of these BNR datasets is still unavailable. Herein, we present the Biological Nitrogen Removal Database (BNRdb), an integrated resource containing various manually curated BNR-related data. At present, BNRdb contains 23,308 microbial strains, 46 gene families, 24 enzymes, 18 reactions, 301 BNR treatment datasets, 860 BNR-associated next-generation sequencing datasets, and 6 common BNR bioreactor systems. BNRdb provides a user-friendly interface enabling interactive data browsing. To our knowledge, BNRdb is the first BNR data resource that systematically integrates BNR data from archaeal, bacterial, and fungal communities. We believe that BNRdb will contribute to a better understanding of BNR process and nitrogen bioremediation research.

Keywords

• biological nitrogen removal
• bioreactor systems
• microbial communities
• wastewater treatment plants
• data resource