The present paper reviews limited information available on the metabolism and the microbial community structure of EBPR, highlighting the microbial ecological selection of PAB in EBPR processes.
Intracellular glycogen is assumed to function as a regulator of the redox balance in the cell.
Storage of glycogen is a key strategy for PAB to maintain the redox balance in the anaerobic uptake of various organic substrates, and hence to win in the microbial selection. PAB may not be composed of a few limited genospecies, but involve phylogenetically and taxonomically diverse groups of bacteria. To define microbial community structure of EBPR processes, it is needed to look more closely into the occurrence and behavior of each species of PAB in various EBPR processes mainly by molecular methods because many of PAB seem to be impossible to culture. All rights reserved.