Impact of crop irrigation with wastewater on soil microbiota diversity

Abstract

In front of the water scarcity problem, the use of treated wastewater appears as a viable alternative to supply the agricultural sector demand, the main consumer of available water in the world. Thus, this project aims to evaluate if the use of disinfected wastewater for crop irrigation changes the soil microbiota diversity, by 16S metabarcoding analysis. For this, a partnership with the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA) is proposed. In addition to better understanding the soil microbial community behavior under the application of treated wastewater, the internship will enable to develop expertise in the exploitation of high throughput data with an applied perspective in environmental engineering solutions by the use of software's and pipelines that are state-of-the-art and/or widely acknowledged in the field will be used.