Rational design of microbial community mixtures for biogas production

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Microbial communities play key roles in biotechnologies such as Anaerobic digestion (AD). AD is becoming an increasingly widespread technology for the production of biogas and the management of human and agricultural waste, estimated to contribute up to 7.5% of UK renewable energy supplies by 2020. Despite a good understanding of how performance can be enhanced by the physical engineering of AD reactors and the addition of specific nutrients, much less is known about the powerhouse of ADs - the microbial community itself - and how this can be manipulated to increase the efficiency of biogas production.We have recently shown that biogas production during AD can be enhanced simply by mixing multiple microbial communities together, resulting in increased gas yields in the order of 10%. Here, we propose to greatly refine this process by identifying particularly productive community combinations, on the basis of where the communities were originally isolated from and a "metabolic fingerprint" showing what the community is consuming and producing. We will determine how the approach can be applied to real-word settings by identifying optimal conditions for the invasion of failing reactors. Finally, we will test the approach in a controlled industrial trial involving 12 AD reactors, half of which will be invaded with while the other half will be left as controls.The work, conducted by experts at the Universities of Exeter and York, will have the financial and logistical support of Amur Energy - a leading AD consultant in the UK. Their unrivalled access to the UK's AD community and their extensive fleet of agricultural lorries operated by their parent company, AB Agri, make the approach both commercially viable and of huge environmental benefit. In addition to the clear benefits for biogas production and waste management, the work will greatly improve our understanding of the consequences of community mixing (a process that occurs all the time in nature) in general, and have potential to improve the efficiency of other processes involving microbial communities, such as sewage treatment and the detoxification of contaminated water and soil.