Dehalococcoides mccartyi strains are of particular importance for bioremediation due to their unique capability of transforming perchloroethene (PCE) and trichloroethene (TCE) to non-toxic ethene, through the intermediates cis-dichloroethene (cis-DCE) and vinyl chloride (VC). Despite the widespread environmental distribution of Dehalococcoides, biostimulation sometimes fails to promote dechlorination beyond cis-DCE. In our study, microcosms established with garden soil and mangrove sediment also stalled at cis-DCE, albeit Dehalococcoides mccartyi containing the reductive dehalogenase genes tceA, vcrA and bvcA were detected in the soil/sediment inocula. Reductive dechlorination was not promoted beyond cis-DCE, even after multiple biostimulation events with fermentable substrates and a lengthy incubation.

However, transfers from microcosms stalled at cis-DCE yielded dechlorination to ethene with subsequent enrichment cultures containing up to 10⁹ Dehalococcoides mccartyi cells mL^-1. Proteobacterial classes which dominated the soil/sediment communities became undetectable in the enrichments, and methanogenic activity drastically decreased after the transfers. We hypothesized that biostimulation of Dehalococcoides in the cis-DCE-stalled microcosms was impeded by other microbes present at higher abundances than Dehalococcoides and utilizing terminal electron acceptors from the soil/sediment, hence, outcompeting Dehalococcoides for H₂. In support of this hypothesis, we show that garden soil and mangrove sediment microcosms bioaugmented with their respective cultures containing Dehalococcoides in high abundance were able to compete for H² for reductive dechlorination from one biostimulation event and produced ethene with no obvious stall. Overall, our results provide an alternate explanation to consolidate conflicting observations on the ubiquity of Dehalococcoides mccartyi and occasional stalling of dechlorination at cis-DCE; thus, bringing a new perspective to better assess biological potential of different environments and to understand microbial interactions governing bioremediation.

The inverse problem associated with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy requiring the solution of a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind is considered. If the underlying physical model is not clearly determined, the inverse problem needs to be solved using a regularized linear least squares problem that is obtained from the discretization of the integral equation. For this system, it is shown that the model error can be made negligible by a change of variables and by extending the effective range of quadrature. This change of variables serves as a right preconditioner that significantly improves the condition of the system. Still, to obtain feasible solutions the additional constraint of non-negativity is required. Simulations with artificial, but realistic, data demonstrate that the use of non-negatively constrained least squares with a smoothing norm provides higher quality solutions than those obtained without the non-negative constraint. Using higher-order smoothing norms also reduces the error in the solutions. The L-curve and residual periodogram parameter choice criteria, which are used for parameter choice with regularized linear least squares, are successfully adapted to be used for the non-negatively constrained Tikhonov least squares problem. Although these results have been verified within the context of the analysis of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, there is no reason to suppose that they would not be relevant within the broader framework of solving Fredholm integral equations for other applications.