Abstract
The complexity of the microbial communities and metabolic pathways involved in the microbiological process of biogas production is poorly understood and numerous microorganisms in the fermentation sample of the biogas plant are still unclassified or unknown. The structure and function of microbial communities and the effects of the addition of trace elements are needed to be known, to control and channel the energy sources microbes produce and to capture and store the useful by-products or for targeted screening of novel enzymes. In this review, we discussed an emerging idea that Metagenome sequence data from a biogas-producing microbial community residing in a fermenter of a biogas plant provide the basis for a rational approach to improve the biotechnological process of biogas production. The composition and gene content of a biogas-producing consortium can be determined through metagenomic approach which allows the design of the optimal microbial community structure for any biogas plant for the significant progress in the efficacy and economic improvement of biogas production and biofertilizer of either balanced nutrition or rich in specific element for plant growth produced from the sludge of biogas plant. Biogas-producing microbial community from different production-scale biogas plants supplied with different raw materials as substrates can be analyzed by polyphasic approach to find out the best raw material composition for biogas production. The phylogenetic structure of the microbial community residing in a fermentation sample from a biogas plant can be analysed by an integrated approach using clone library sequences and metagenome sequence data obtained by 454-pyrosequencing.
 Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 7(1): 6-11
Highlights
Renewable energy production and waste management are currently major issues worldwide
Metagenomics is a comparatively new field of research on natural microbial communities. It has been strongly enhanced by the new high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies like Roche's 454-sequencing, ABI's SOLiD or Illumina's Genome Analyzer, 16S rRNA gene clone libraries and Sanger sequencing of the 16 S rDNA amplicons, SOLiDTM technology (Applied Biosystems), CLC Bio Genomics Work Bench software, MG-RAST software package, Phylogenetic categories, BLASTX, rDNA dataset, Roche's GS FLX Titanium technology, BLAST, RDP database (Release 10.10), CARMA, Genome Sequencer (GS) FLX platform, ARB database (Rothberg et al, 2008; Mardis et al, 2008; Metzker et al, 2010) CARMA is a new software pipeline for the characterization of species composition and the genetic potential of microbial samples using short, unassembled reads
We gave an overview of the field of metagenomics, important bioinformatic tools and possible workflows, accompanied by application examples of biogas surveys successfully conducted
Summary
Renewable energy production and waste management are currently major issues worldwide. The process of biogas production takes place under anaerobic conditions and involves microbial decomposition of organic matter, yielding methane as the main final product of underlying metabolic pathways. Complex consortia of microorganisms are responsible for biomass decomposition and biogas production involving the stages substrate hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis and methanogenesis. Most of these microbes, as well as their roles in biogas production, are currently unknown. The genus Methanoculleus play a dominant role in hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis, Clostridia contributes to the decomposition of organic matter, Archaea play crucial role in biogas production and the Methanomicrobiales are hydrogenotrophic methanogens (Krause et al, 2008). Developments in several bioinformatics approaches are discussed in context of biogas producing microbial metagenomics that include taxonomic systems, sequence databases, and sequence-alignment tools
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