Optimization of wastewater treatment using microalgae through the metabolic modeling of the microbial community

• Grant number: 25/22616-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: April 01, 2026
• End date: February 28, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Chemical Engineering
• Principal Investigator: Ana Teresa Lombardi
• Grantee: Bruno Assis Pessi
• Supervisor: Zoran Nikoloski
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde (CCBS). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Potsdam, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/18573-1 - Optimization of wastewater treatment using microalgae through the metabolic modeling of the microbial community, BP.PD

Abstract

This Research Internship Abroad (RIA) project aims to develop a modelling framework that identifies the key reactions and functional biological groups within the microbial¿community metabolic network of the microalgae¿bacteria symbiosis during wastewater treatment. Current wastewater¿treatment models using microalgae suffer from two major limitations: they do not predict algal biomass composition or shifts in the microbial community. To address the first gap, we will apply an improved version of the Dynamic Reduction of Unbalanced Metabolism (DRUM) framework to the metabolic networks of the photosynthetic organisms, producing reduced subnetworks that preserve essential intracellular pathways while allowing dynamic simulation of internal components (e.g., lipids, proteins). To address the second limitation, we will construct and analyse the community¿scale metabolic models using state of the art constraint¿based tools for the treatments of vinasse and sanitary wastewater. The developed framework during the RIA will later be applied in the second part of the post-doctoral project to the extended algae-bacteria (ALBA) comprehensive model (developed during the first part of the post-doctoral project). The final framework will be the first to couple comprehensive dynamical models of wastewater treatment with the analysis of metabolic networks, paving the way for more robust and better predictive models of wastewater treatment using microalgae.