Monitoring and modeling of microbial activity in wastewater treatment plants and identification of potential biotechnological targets

Microbial communities are complex ecosystems where organisms shape their environment through constant interaction. Dynamic modeling is a powerful mathematical tool to describe these microbial interactions and to infer directionality and causality, as well as to predict the time-dependent properties of a system. In microbiology, it captures the dynamic behaviors of a microbiome in fluctuating environments and more than one model could be plausible for the system of interest, depending on the questions, the assumptions made and the available data. In this thesis we aimed to describe and model the dynamics of the microbial communities living in a wastewater treatment plant. These could lead to the development of innovative and potentially economically advantageous biotechnological processes for wastewater treatment.