microbial community of the methane-producing bioreactors

This study is progressing through an internation effort in collaboration with Prof. Irini Agelidaki of the DTU environment (University of Copenhagen). The final aim was the detailed characterization of the microbial community in methane-producing bioreactors loaded with different substrates (carbohydrates, lipids, proteins) and the analysis of the influence of the microbial community in major drawbacks of the bioreactors such as the foaming process.More recently, we are performing shotgun sequencing of the microbial communities extracted from different bioreactors. By means of a binning process we are extracting the genomes of hundreds of different archaeal and bacterial species in order to define a global database describing the anaerobic digestion microbiome.

Due to the increasing global demand for energy in recent years the limits on the rate of fuel production has created such a bottleneck leading to the current energy crisis. Moreover, the increasing atmospheric pollution and the global warming led to the development of renewable and clean energy forms that are now becoming a critical task for the human society. For this reason, the production of biogas through biomass fermentation has been gaining more attention in many countries, but the biochemical process for anaerobic methane production is complex. The diversity and the abundance of microbes involved in the process plays a major role and is strongly influenced by the composition of the fermentation materials loaded in the bioreactor. This led us to investigate in detail the microbial community involved in methane production through next-generation sequencing approaches.

Results are described in the papers:

Kougias P, Treu L, Campanaro S, Zhu X, Angelidaki I. Dynamic functional characterization and phylogenetic changes due to Long Chain Fatty Acids pulses in biogas reactors. Scientific Reports 2016.

Treu L, Kougias P, Campanaro S, Bassani I, Angelidaki I. Deeper insight into the structure of the anaerobic digestion microbial community; the biogas microbiome database is expanded with 157 new genomes. Bioresource Technology 2016.

Treu L, Campanaro S, Kougias PG, Zhu X, Angelidaki I. Untangling the effect of fatty acids addition at species level revealed different transcriptional responses of the biogas microbial community members. Environmental Science and Technology. 2016.

Campanaro S, Treu L, Kougias PG, De Francisci D, Valle G, Angelidaki I. Metagenomic analysis and functional characterization of the biogas microbiome using high throughput shotgun sequencing and a novel binning strategy. Biotechnology for Biofuels. 2016; 9:26.

De Francisci D, Kougias PG , Treu L, Campanaro S, Angelidaki I. Microbial diversity and dynamicity of biogas reactors due to radical changes of feedstock composition. Bioresource Technology. 2015;176:56–64.

Kougias PG, De Francisci D, Treu L, Campanaro S, Angelidaki I. Microbial analysis in biogas reactors suffering by foaming incidents. Bioresource Technology. 2014;167:24-32.