Abstract
Establishing a core microbiome is the first step in understanding and subsequently optimizing microbial interactions in anodic biofilms of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) for increased power, efficiency, and decreased start-up times. In the present study, we used 454 pyrosequencing to demonstrate that a core anodic community would consistently emerge over a period of 4 years given similar conditions. The development and variation across reactor designs of these communities was also explored. The core members present in all high-power generating biofilms were Geobacter, Aminiphilus, Sedimentibacter, Acetoanaerobium, and Spirochaeta, accounting for 72 ± 9 % of all genera. Aminiphilus spp., member of the Synergistetes phylum was present at higher abundances than previously reported in any other ecological studies. Results suggest a stable core microbiome in acetate-fed MFCs on both phylogenetic and functional levels.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Altschul SF, Gish W, Miller W, Myers EW, Lipman DJ (1990) Basic local alignment search tool. J Mol Biol 215:403–410. doi:10.1016/S0022-2836(05)80360-2
Borole AP, Hamilton CY, Vishnivetskaya T, Leak D, Andras C (2009) Improving power production in acetate-fed microbial fuel cells via enrichment of exoelectrogenic organisms in flow-through systems. Biochem Eng J 48:71–80. doi:10.1016/j.bej.2009.08.008
Borole AP, Hamilton CY, Vishnivetskaya TA (2011) Enhancement in current density and energy conversion efficiency of 3-dimensional MFC anodes using pre-enriched consortium and continuous supply of electron donors. Bioresour Technol 102:5098–5104. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2011.01.045
Cole JR, Wang Q, Cardenas E, Fish J, Chai B, Farris RJ, Kulam-Syed-Mohideen AS, McGarrell DM, Marsh T, Garrity GM, Tiedje JM (2009) The Ribosomal Database Project: improved alignments and new tools for rRNA analysis. Nucleic Acids Res 37:D141–D145. doi:10.1093/nar/gkn879
Díaz C, Baena S, Fardeau M-L, Patel BKC (2007) Aminiphilus circumscriptus gen. nov., sp. nov., an anaerobic amino-acid-degrading bacterium from an upflow anaerobic sludge reactor. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 57:1914–1918. doi:10.1099/ijs.0.63614-0
Ducey TF, Hunt PG (2013) Microbial community analysis of swine wastewater anaerobic lagoons by next-generation DNA sequencing. Anaerobe 21:50–57. doi:10.1016/j.anaerobe.2013.03.005
Edgar RC (2004) MUSCLE: multiple sequence alignment with high accuracy and high throughput. Nucleic Acids Res 32:1792–1797. doi:10.1093/nar/gkh340
Erable B, Roncato M-A, Achouak W, Bergel A (2009) Sampling natural biofilms: a new route to build efficient microbial anodes. Environ Sci Technol 43:3194–3199. doi:10.1021/es803549v
Fan Y, Hu H, Liu H (2007) Enhanced Coulombic efficiency and power density of air-cathode microbial fuel cells with an improved cell configuration. J Power Sources 171:348–354. doi:10.1016/j.jpowsour.2007.06.220
Fan Y, Sharbrough E, Liu H (2008) Quantification of the internal resistance distribution of microbial fuel cells. Environ Sci Technol 42:8101–8107. doi:10.1021/es801229j
Fan Y, Han S-K, Liu H (2012) Improved performance of CEA microbial fuel cells with increased reactor size. Energy Environ Sci 5:8273. doi:10.1039/c2ee21964f
Franks AE, Nevin K (2010) Microbial fuel cells, a current review. Energies 3:899–919
Hamady M, Lozupone C, Knight R (2010) Fast UniFrac: Facilitating high-throughput phylogenetic analyses of microbial communities including analysis of pyrosequencing and PhyloChip data. ISME J 4:17–27. doi:10.1038/ismej.2009.97
Ishii S, Watanabe K, Yabuki S, Logan BE, Sekiguchi Y (2008) Comparison of electrode reduction activities of Geobacter sulfurreducens and an enriched consortium in an air-cathode microbial fuel cell. Appl Environ Microbiol 74:7348–7355. doi:10.1128/AEM.01639-08
Jia J, Tang Y, Liu B, Wu D, Ren N, Xing D (2013) Electricity generation from food wastes and microbial community structure in microbial fuel cells. Bioresour Technol 144:94–99. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2013.06.072
Kiely PD, Call DF, Yates MD, Regan JM, Logan BE (2010) Anodic biofilms in microbial fuel cells harbor low numbers of higher-power-producing bacteria than abundant genera. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 88:371–380. doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2757-2
Kiely PD, Regan JM, Logan BE (2011) The electric picnic: synergistic requirements for exoelectrogenic microbial communities. Curr Opin Biotechnol 22:378–385. doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2011.03.003
Kuczynski J, Costello EK, Nemergut DR, Zaneveld J, Lauber CL, Knights D, Koren O, Fierer N, Kelley ST, Ley RE, Gordon JI, Knight R (2010) Direct sequencing of the human microbiome readily reveals community differences. Genome Biol 11:210. doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-5-210
Lee T, Van Doan T, Yoo K, Choi S, Kim C, Park J (2010) Discovery of commonly existing anode biofilm microbes in two different wastewater treatment MFCs using FLX Titanium pyrosequencing. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 87:2335–2343. doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2680-6
Liu H, Logan BE (2004) Electricity generation using an air-cathode single chamber microbial fuel cell in the presence and absence of a proton exchange membrane. Environ Sci Technol 38:4040–4046. doi:10.1021/es0499344
Logan BE (2008) Microbial fuel cells. Wiley
Malvankar NS, Lau J, Nevin KP, Franks AE, Tuominen MT, Lovley DR (2012) Electrical conductivity in a mixed-species biofilm. Appl Environ Microbiol 78:5967–5971. doi:10.1128/AEM.01803-12
Malvankar NS, Vargas M, Nevin KP, Franks AE, Leang C, Kim B-C, Inoue K, Mester T, Covalla SF, Johnson JP, Rotello VM, Tuominen MT, Lovley DR (2011) Tunable metallic-like conductivity in microbial nanowire networks. Nat Nanotechnol 6:573–579. doi:10.1038/nnano.2011.119
Murali Mohan A, Hartsock A, Hammack RW, Vidic RD, Gregory KB (2013) Microbial communities in flowback water impoundments from hydraulic fracturing for recovery of shale gas. FEMS Microbiol Ecol. doi:10.1111/1574-6941.12183
Parameswaran P, Zhang H, Torres CI, Rittmann BE, Krajmalnik-Brown R (2010) Microbial community structure in a biofilm anode fed with a fermentable substrate: the significance of hydrogen scavengers. Biotechnol Bioeng 105:69–78. doi:10.1002/bit.22508
Potter MC (1911) Electrical effects accompanying the decomposition of organic compounds. Proc R Soc Lond Ser B Contain Pap Biol Character 84:260–276
Ren Z, Ramasamy RP, Cloud-Owen SR, Yan H, Mench MM, Regan JM (2011) Time-course correlation of biofilm properties and electrochemical performance in single-chamber microbial fuel cells. Bioresour Technol 102:416–421. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2010.06.003
Sasaki D, Sasaki K, Watanabe A, Morita M, Matsumoto N, Igarashi Y, Ohmura N (2013) Operation of a cylindrical bioelectrochemical reactor containing carbon fiber fabric for efficient methane fermentation from thickened sewage sludge. Bioresour Technol 129:366–373. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2012.11.048
Scherr KE, Lundaa T, Klose V, Bochmann G, Loibner AP (2012) Changes in bacterial communities from anaerobic digesters during petroleum hydrocarbon degradation. J Biotechnol 157:564–572. doi:10.1016/j.jbiotec.2011.09.003
Schloss PD, Westcott SL, Ryabin T, Hall JR, Hartmann M, Hollister EB, Lesniewski RA, Oakley BB, Parks DH, Robinson CJ, Sahl JW, Stres B, Thallinger GG, Van Horn DJ, Weber CF (2009) Introducing mothur: open-source, platform-independent, community-supported software for describing and comparing microbial communities. Appl Environ Microbiol 75:7537–7541. doi:10.1128/AEM.01541-09
Shade A, Handelsman J (2012) Beyond the Venn diagram: the hunt for a core microbiome. Environ Microbiol 14:4–12. doi:10.1111/j.1462-2920.2011.02585.x
Sleat R, Mah RA, Robinson R (1985) Acetoanaerobium noterae gen. nov., sp. nov.: an anaerobic bacterium that forms acetate from H2 and CO2. Int J Syst Bacteriol 35:10–15. doi:10.1099/00207713-35-1-10
Turnbaugh PJ, Ley RE, Mahowald MA, Magrini V, Mardis ER, Gordon JI (2006) An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest. Nature 444:1027–131. doi:10.1038/nature05414
Vargas IT, Albert IU, Regan JM (2013) Spatial distribution of bacterial communities on volumetric and planar anodes in single-chamber air-cathode microbial fuel cells. Biotechnol Bioeng. doi:10.1002/bit.24949
Wang X, Hu M, Xia Y, Wen X, Ding K (2012) Pyrosequencing analysis of bacterial diversity in 14 wastewater treatment systems in China. Appl Environ Microbiol 78:7042–7047. doi:10.1128/AEM.01617-12
Xu M, Chen X, Qiu M, Zeng X, Xu J, Deng D, Sun G, Li X, Guo J (2012) Bar-coded pyrosequencing reveals the responses of PBDE-degrading microbial communities to electron donor amendments. PLoS ONE 7:e30439. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030439
Yates MD, Kiely PD, Call DF, Rismani-Yazdi H, Bibby K, Peccia J, Regan JM, Logan BE (2012) Convergent development of anodic bacterial communities in microbial fuel cells. ISME J 6:2002–2013. doi:10.1038/ismej.2012.42
Yi H, Nevin KP, Kim B-C, Franks AE, Klimes A, Tender LM, Lovley DR (2009) Selection of a variant of Geobacter sulfurreducens with enhanced capacity for current production in microbial fuel cells. Biosens Bioelectron 24:3498–3503. doi:10.1016/j.bios.2009.05.004
Zhang G, Zhao Q, Jiao Y, Wang K, Lee D-J, Ren N (2012) Efficient electricity generation from sewage sludge using biocathode microbial fuel cell. Water Res 46:43–52. doi:10.1016/j.watres.2011.10.036
Ziganshin AM, Schmidt T, Scholwin F, Il’inskaya ON, Harms H, Kleinsteuber S (2011) Bacteria and archaea involved in anaerobic digestion of distillers grains with solubles. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 89:2039–2052. doi:10.1007/s00253-010-2981-9
Acknowledgments
We thank Mark Dasenko at the Oregon State University Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB) for sequencing support. Research was financially supported by the US National Science Foundation (CBET 0955124).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lesnik, K.L., Liu, H. Establishing a core microbiome in acetate-fed microbial fuel cells. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 98, 4187–4196 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-013-5502-9
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-013-5502-9