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Persistence of Methanosaeta populations in anaerobic digestion during process instability

  • Environmental Microbiology
  • Published:
Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology

Abstract

Anaerobic digestion is a sustainable technology for the treatment of organic waste and production of biogas. Acetoclastic methanogenesis accounts for the majority of methane production in anaerobic digestion. Therefore, sustaining robust acetoclastic methanogens is important for stable process performance. Due to faster growth kinetics at high acetate concentrations, it has been considered that Methanosarcina would be more prevalent than Methanosaeta in unstable anaerobic digestion processes which frequently experience high acetate levels. Methanogen population dynamics were monitored in multiple continuous anaerobic digesters for 500 days. Results from quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis show that Methanosaeta dominated over Methanosarcina in anaerobic digestion at high acetate levels up to 44 mM, suggesting the potential of Methanosaeta as a robust and efficient acetoclastic candidate for resilient anaerobic methane conversion. Further efforts are needed to identify mechanisms contributing to the unexpected competitiveness of these methanogens at high acetate levels observed in this study.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the Science Alliance—Tennessee Center of Excellence and the US Environmental Protection Agency Grant SU834318. SC was partly supported by the Institute for Secure and Sustainable Environment at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Si Chen & Qiang He

  2. Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Qiang He

Authors
  1. Si Chen
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  2. Qiang He
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Correspondence to Qiang He.

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Chen, S., He, Q. Persistence of Methanosaeta populations in anaerobic digestion during process instability. J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol 42, 1129–1137 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-015-1632-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-015-1632-7

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