In my comparative study for nutrient degradation among planktonic and biofilm mode of ammonia,nitrate,Total nitrogen. The dropped percentage of residual ammonia, nitrate, and total nitrogen in planktonic (PI) and biofilm (BI) mode of degradation on 4th day was found to be 30.97 %, 22.86%, 18.70% and 42.24 %, 34.09 %, 33.45 % respectively and on 8th day of degradation study, the residual percentage for ammonia, nitrate and total nitrogen for planktonic (PI) and biofilm (BI) mode of degradation were found to be 36.79 %, 21.11%, 17.94% and 28.01%, 61.52%, 51.46% respectively. why it happens ??
Could you share a bit more details on your set-up, and which %removal is related to which type of treatment ?
This will help in giving a qualified answer.
Guessing from the information giving it is the biofilm system that increases the performance and I expect it is because the Biofilm will allow the accumulation of the relative slow growing autotrophic bacteria wich will not be the case in the planktonic system
Biofilm has been considered as extracellular enzyme immobilization system where secreted enzymes are localized closed to bacterial cells, such that the metabolic activity of biofilm cells might be higher than that of suspend cells. Biofilm containing multiple enzymes can also promotes enzyme activities especially in cascade biochemistry reactions. But a lot of them are just speculations. See a good reference (http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v8/n9/abs/nrmicro2415.html).
With the advance of our molecular knowledge of biofilm, we might be able to test some of the hypotheses under control systems. eg., compare the degradation activity of the biofilm-knockouts of a single bacteria to that of the wild type bacteria.
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