Rational design of microbial community mixtures for biogas production

微生物群落在厌氧消化(AD)等生物技术中发挥着关键作用。AD正在成为一项越来越广泛的沼气生产和人类和农业废物管理技术，预计到2020年将占英国可再生能源供应的7.5%。尽管对如何通过AD反应器的物理工程和添加特定营养物质来提高性能有很好的了解，但对ADS的动力源-微生物群落本身-以及如何通过操纵这一点来提高沼气生产效率的了解要少得多。我们最近已经证明，AD期间的沼气生产可以通过将多个微生物群落混合在一起来提高，导致气体产量增加约10%。在这里，我们建议通过识别特别有生产力的社区组合来极大地改进这一过程，该组合基于社区最初被隔离的位置和显示社区正在消费和生产什么的“代谢指纹”。我们将通过确定入侵故障反应堆的最佳条件来确定如何将该方法应用于实际设置。最后，我们将在12个AD反应堆的受控工业试验中测试该方法，其中一半将被入侵，另一半将作为控制。这项工作由埃克塞特大学和约克大学的专家进行，将得到英国领先的AD咨询公司Amur Energy的财务和后勤支持。他们无与伦比地进入英国的AD社区，以及由母公司AB Agi运营的庞大农用卡车车队，使这种方法在商业上可行，并具有巨大的环境效益。除了沼气生产和废物管理的明显好处外，这项工作还将极大地提高我们对群落混合(自然界中无时无刻不发生的过程)后果的了解，并有可能提高其他涉及微生物群落的过程的效率，如污水处理和受污染水和土壤的解毒。

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.