Martínez Quintela, MiguelBalboa Méndez, SabelaCoves Maciá, Jose RubénOmil Prieto, FranciscoSuárez Martínez, Sonia2022-11-112022-11-112022Journal of Hazardous Materials 442 (2023) 129983http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29406There is scarce information about the biotransformation of organic micropollutants (OMPs) under anoxic conditions. In this study, a heterotrophic denitrifying bioreactor was set up to study the fate of several OMPs from metabolic and microbiological points of view. Primary metabolic activity was increased by adding progressively higher nitrogen loading rates during the operation (from 0.075 to 0.4 g N-NO3- L−1 d−1), which resulted in an important shift in the microbial population from a specialized biomass to a more diverse community. Such a change provoked a significant increase in the removal efficiency of erythromycin (ERY), roxithromycin (ROX) and bisphenol-A (BPA), and some bacterial taxa, such as Rhodoplanes, were identified as possible indicators related to the biodegradation of these compounds. The increasing primary metabolic activity in the reactor did not enhance the OMP-specific removal rates, suggesting that the bacterial composition is more influential than cometabolismeng© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc/4.0/)Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Organic micropollutantsBiodiversityCometabolismAnoxic processjournal article10.1016/j.jhazmat.2022.1299830304-3894open access