The anammox (anaerobic ammonium oxidation) process has attracted much attention for its cost-saving. However, excess nitrate is usually produced which should be further treated. In this study, an innovative process combined anammox with partial denitrification (nitrate -> nitrite) was proposed for advanced nitrogen removal in two sequencing batch reactors (SBRs). The nitrate produced in anammox-SBR (ASBR) was fed into partial denitrification-SBR (DSBR), in which the nitrate was reduced to nitrite, and then removed by backflow of the nitrite to ASBR for secondary anammox process. Results showed that similar to 80% nitrate in the effluent of previous anammox was converted to nitrite in DSBR. And the maximum nitrogen removal efficiency (NRE) of 94.06% was obtained with total nitrogen (TN) in the effluent of 10.98 mg/L in average. It indicated that desired effluent quality could be achieved, and the advanced nitrogen removal performance was attributed to the successful achievement of partial denitrification. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.