ABSTRACT: Long-term monitoring reveals stable and remarkably similar microbial communities in parallel full-scale biogas reactors digesting energy crops
Project description:Functional redundant and similar microbial communities within biogas reactors treating maize silage in co-fermentation with sugar beet silage
Project description:The functional diversity of soil microbial communities was explored for a poplar plantation, which was treated solely with biogas slurry, or combined with biochar at different fertilization intensities over several years.
Project description:Industrial anaerobic digestion (AD) represents a relevant energy source beyond today’s fossil fuels, wherein organic matter is recycled to methane gas via an intricate and complex microbial food web. Despite its potential, anaerobic reactors often undergo process instability over time, mainly caused by substrate composition perturbations, making the system unreliable for stable energy production. To ensure the reliability of AD technologies, it is crucial to identify microbial- and system responses to better understand the effect of such perturbations and ultimately detect signatures indicative of process failure . Here, we investigate the effect of microalgal organic loading rate (OLR) on the fermentation products profile, microbiome dynamics, and disruption/recovery of major microbial metabolisms. Reactors subjected to low- and high-OLR disturbances were operated and monitored for fermentation products and biogas production over time, while microbial responses were investigated via 16S rRNA gene amplicon data, shotgun metagenomics and metagenome-centric metaproteomics.