Abstract
Microalgae cultivation in municipal, industrial and agricultural wastewater is an emerging, highly effective approach for resource recovery and concomitant bioenergy generation. Wastewater effluents represent ideal sources of nutrients for eukaryotic green algal species. However, the performance of photosynthetic green algae is strongly dependent on the associated bacterial partners present in the effluents. Our combined wastewater treatment and biohydrogen evolution approach applied green microalgae-based photoheterotrophic degradation using dark fermentation wastewater effluent as substrate. The results showed that condition-dependent mutualistic relationships between the microbial and Chlorella algae populations had direct impact on the biodegradation efficiency and also on algal biohydrogen production. Metagenome analysis of the novel hybrid biodegradation system together with total nitrogen and phosphorous analytics provided important clues for the primary importance of the green algae partner in nitrogen and phosphorous removal. Bacterial bin genome data also indicated algal growth promotion by bacterial partners. With further development and optimization this new approach can lead to a highly efficient simultaneous organic waste mitigation and renewable energy production technology.
Highlights
It is generally accepted that fundamental changes in fossil fuel policies are required in order to prevent unleashed increase in global average temperatures which could translate into amplified rates of extreme weather patterns and increasing sea levels (IPCC, 2013)
The dark fermentation effluent (EFF) of an industrial raw wastewater (RIW) originated from a beer brewing factory was used as our basic, initial substrate for the photoheterotrophic propagation of Ch. vulgaris green microalgae
An important question was whether selected microalgae strains were able to proliferate and generate considerable amount of biohydrogen when grown on dark fermentation effluents
Summary
It is generally accepted that fundamental changes in fossil fuel policies are required in order to prevent unleashed increase in global average temperatures which could translate into amplified rates of extreme weather patterns and increasing sea levels (IPCC, 2013). The past decade has showed an expansion of interest from the established anaerobic technologies toward developing photosynthesis-based processes in order to convert organic waste into biohydrogen and other valuable end products (Xu and Lancaster, 2009; Boboescu et al, 2014; Venkateswar Reddy et al, 2014; Han et al, 2016; Wirth et al, 2018). During dark fermentation complex organic substrates are converted into organic acids, alcohols, carbon dioxide, and H2 by fermentative bacteria (Calusinska et al, 2015) These metabolites as well as glucose, sucrose and succinate can be further converted to H2, carbon dioxide, and a series of valuable metabolites by photo-fermentation under anaerobic conditions in the presence of light (Kim et al, 2014).
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