19-ERACoBioTech SYNBIOGAS: Synthetic landfill microbiomes for enhanced anaerobic digestion to biogas

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Lignocellulosic plant biomass is the most abundant waste product generated by society, agriculture and industry. By 2025, global cities willgenerate approximately 2.2 billion tonnes of solid waste biomass per year, with significant impacts upon health and the economy at bothlocal and global scales. Natural communities of microorganisms (microbiomes) convert waste biomass to methane-rich biogas that can beused as a sustainable and renewable green-energy source to generate electricity, heat and power, and biomethane for injection into thenational gas grid and production of transport fuels. Anaerobic digestion (AD) plants and landfill sites are engineered environments wherethese microbial processes are harnessed for waste decomposition and biogas production. The EU is the largest global producer of biogasfrom biomass, with over 17,000 AD plants, and consequently, the microbiological conversion of solid waste residues to biogas in AD plantsand landfill sites presents an unprecedented opportunity to leverage key enabling technologies for a sustainable bio-based economy forgreen-energy production. In turn, conversion of waste biomass to biomethane will mitigate the escalating environmental and social impactsof waste residues. However, the metabolic function of microorganisms responsible for anaerobic digestion is poorly understood, and mostprevious studies have focused on animal gut microorganisms that are typically used to incoluate microorganisms into anaerobic digestionplants as slurry. One of the major bottlenecks to industrial application of microorganisms for biomass-conversion is low substrate specificity,low temperature tolerance, and an inability to perform optimally under reaction conditions. Natural microorganisms found in landfill sitesrepresent an unexplored repository of biomass-degrading enzyme diversity with the potential to enhance existing industrialbiomass-conversion processes. Landfill microorganisms are already adapted to engineered environments, mineralise diverse solid wastetypes, produce methane-rich biogas, and are therefore good candidates for the bioaugmentation of anaerobic digestion processes. The SYNBIOGAS consortium is an academic-industry partnership that will integrate diverse and cutting-edge technological, analytical,engineering and computational approaches for characterisation of the landfill biomass-degrading microbiome. Microbial isolations, DNAsequencing, enzyme characterisation and computational modelling of landfill microbial biomass-conversion processes will inform the designand validation of optimised synthetic landfill microbiomes (SLMs) for enhanced waste biomass-conversion in AD plants and landfill sites, andto develop applications of the SLM that can be readily adopted by industry. Engineering biomass-degrading microbiomes is a new researchfrontier with many novel applications, including bioaugmentation and optimisation of biomass conversion in AD and landfill systems towardsan enhanced bio-based economy for waste management, environmental protection, and sustainable intensification of renewable energygeneration.