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Fungi-microalgae consortium (FMC) has emerged as a promising system for advanced wastewater treatment due to its high biomass yield and environmental sustainability. This study aimed to investigate the nutrients removal, bacterial community shift, emerging contaminants elimination, and treatment mechanism of a FMC composed of Cordyceps militaris and Navicula seminulum for aquaculture pond water treatment. The fungi and microalgae were cultured and employed either alone or in combination to evaluate the treatment performance. The results demonstrated that the FMC could improve water quality more significantly by reducing nutrient pollutants and optimizing the bacterial community structures. Furthermore, it exhibited stronger positive correlation between the enrichment of functional bacteria for water quality improvement and pollutants removal performance than the single-species treatments. Moreover, the FMC outperformed other groups in eliminating emerging contaminants such as heavy metals, antibiotics, and pathogenic Vibrios. Superiorly, the FMC also showed excellent symbiotic interactions and cooperative mechanisms for pollutants removal. The results collectively corroborated the feasibility and sustainability of using C. militaris and N. seminulum for treating aquaculture water, and the FMC would produce more mutualistic benefits and synergistic effects than single-species treatments., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Aquaculture pond sediments have a notable influence on the ecosystem balance and farmed animal health. In this study, microalgal-bacterial immobilization (MBI) was designed to improve aquaculture pond sediments via synergistic interactions. The physicochemical characteristics, bacterial communities, and the removal efficiencies of emerging pollutants were systematically investigated. The consortium containing diatom Navicula seminulum and Alcaligenes faecalis was cultivated and established in the free and immobilized forms for evaluating the treatment performance. The results indicated that the immobilized group exhibited superior performance in controlling nutrient pollutants, shaping and optimizing the bacterial community compositions with the enrichment of functional bacteria. Additionally, it showed a stronger positive correlation between the bacterial community shifts and nutrient pollutants removal compared to free cells. Furthermore, the immobilized system maintained the higher removal performance of emerging pollutants (heavy metals, antibiotics, and pathogenic Vibrios) than free group. These findings confirmed that the employment of immobilized N. seminulum and A. faecalis produced more synergistic benefits and exerted more improvements than free cells in ameliorating aquaculture pond sediments, suggesting the potential for engineering application of functional microalgal-bacterial consortium in aquaculture., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)