Abstract
Coal seam microbes, as endogenous drivers of secondary biogenic gas production in coal seams, might be related to methane production in coal seams. In this study, we carried out anaerobic indoor culture experiments of microorganisms from three different depths of bituminous coal seams in Huainan mining area, and revealed the secondary biogas generation mechanism of bituminous coal seams by using the combined analysis of macro-genome and metabolism multi-omics. The results showed that the cumulative mass molar concentrations (Molality) of biomethane production increased with the increase of the coal seam depth in two consecutive cycles. At the genus level, there were significant differences in the bacterial and archaeal community structures corresponding to the three coal seams 1#, 6#, and 9#(p < 0.05). The volatile matter of air-dry basis (Vad) of coal was significantly correlated with differences in genus-level composition of bacteria and archaea, with correlations of R bacterial = 0.368 and R archaeal = 0.463, respectively. Functional gene analysis showed that the relative abundance of methanogenesis increased by 42% before and after anaerobic fermentation cultivation. Meanwhile, a total of 11 classes of carbon metabolism homologues closely related to methanogenesis were detected in the liquid metabolites of coal bed microbes after 60 days of incubation. Finally, the fatty acid, amino acid and carbohydrate synergistic methanogenic metabolic pathway was reconstructed based on the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database. The expression level of mcrA gene within the metabolic pathway of the 1# deep coal sample was significantly higher than that of the other two groups (p < 0.05 for significance), and the efficient expression of mcrA gene at the end of the methanogenic pathway promoted the conversion of bituminous coal organic matter to methane. Therefore, coal matrix compositions may be the key factors causing diversity in microbial community and metabolic function, which might be related to the different methane content in different coal seams.
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Acknowledgements
The paper was supported by National Key R&D Program of China(NO.2023YFC3009002); Independent Research fund of Joint National-Local Engineering Research Centre for Safe and Precise Coal Mining(Anhui University of Science and Technology)(NO. EC2023006); The Key Research and Development Projects in Anhui Province(NO.2022l07020020); National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52274171); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52104113).
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X.Z., B.L., S.X., J.C., C.Z.,Y.Y.,Y.Z.,J.W., and J.Z. conducted the bulk of the data analysis for the study and co-wrote the manuscript. X.Z.,B.L.,S.X.andC.Z. provided the funding for the study, were involved in the conceptualization of the study, as well as assisted in the writing of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Communicated by Yusuf Akhter.
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Zhang, X., Liu, B., Xue, S. et al. Mechanisms of secondary biogenic coalbed methane formation in bituminous coal seams: a joint experimental and multi-omics study. Arch Microbiol 206, 263 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-024-03990-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-024-03990-w