Abstract
To investigate the distribution and dynamics of microbial community in anaerobic digestion at agitated and non-agitated condition, 454 pyrosequencing of 16s rRNA was conducted. It revealed the distinct community compositions between the two digesters and their progressive shifting over time. Methanogens and syntrophic bacteria were found much less abundant in the agitated digester, which was mainly attributed to the presence of bacterial genera Acetanaerobacterium and Ruminococcus with relatively high abundance. The characterization of the microbial community corroborated the digestion performance affected at the agitated condition, where lower methane yield and delayed methane production rate were observed. This was further verified by the accumulation of propionic acid in the agitated digester.
Highlights
The divergent effect of agitation on anaerobic digestion has been reported by some studies, while most of which investigated the conventional physiochemical properties[1,2], few evaluated the link between digestion performance and microbial activities, focusing on a small group of bacteria and archaea [3]
In trial 2, digester 1 showed higher soluble Chemical Oxygen Demand (sCOD) degradation rate and CH4 production rate than in trial 2 due to that the digester was inoculated with liquor recovered from the previous trial, which had been adapted to tailings decomposition
The study was conducted to investigate the effect of agitating on anaerobic digestion, focusing on the microbial community dynamics that was revealed to be heavily influenced by agitation
Summary
The divergent effect of agitation on anaerobic digestion has been reported by some studies, while most of which investigated the conventional physiochemical properties[1,2], few evaluated the link between digestion performance and microbial activities, focusing on a small group of bacteria and archaea [3]. The approach, termed Sanger sequencing, has been applied in Tian et al (2013) to compare the microbial community structures for anaerobic digestion at agitated and non-agitated condition, led to the identification of some major microbial phylotypes in bacteria or archaea domain. New development of high-throughput nextgeneration sequencing technologies (NGS), such as 454 barcoded pyrosequencing, eliminates the laborious step of preparing clone libraries, and makes large scale environmental sequencing cost effective and keeps the bias small [4]. In the context of anaerobic digestion, 454 pyrosequencing has been utilized in characterizing biogas-producing communities, revealing a number of new bacteria involved [6,7], but as far as we are aware studying the effect of agitation on entire microbial communities using the technique has rarely been reported
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