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Biology

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

2016

Anaerobic digestion

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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Relating Anaerobic Digestion Microbial Community And Process Function, Kaushik Venkiteshwaran, Benjamin T.W. Bocher, James Maki, Daniel Zitomer Apr 2016

Relating Anaerobic Digestion Microbial Community And Process Function, Kaushik Venkiteshwaran, Benjamin T.W. Bocher, James Maki, Daniel Zitomer

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Anaerobic digestion (AD) involves a consortium of microorganisms that convert substrates into biogas containing methane for renewable energy. The technology has suffered from the perception of being periodically unstable due to limited understanding of the relationship between microbial community structure and function. The emphasis of this review is to describe microbial communities in digesters and quantitative and qualitative relationships between community structure and digester function. Progress has been made in the past few decades to identify key microorganisms influencing AD. Yet, more work is required to realize robust, quantitative relationships between microbial community structure and functions such as methane production …


Mcra Gene Abundance Correlates With Hydrogenotrophic Methane Production Rates In Full-Scale Anaerobic Waste Treatment Systems, R. L. Morris, Vaibhav Panjabrao Tale, P. P. Mathai, Daniel Zitomer, James Maki Feb 2016

Mcra Gene Abundance Correlates With Hydrogenotrophic Methane Production Rates In Full-Scale Anaerobic Waste Treatment Systems, R. L. Morris, Vaibhav Panjabrao Tale, P. P. Mathai, Daniel Zitomer, James Maki

Biological Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Anaerobic treatment is a sustainable and economical technology for waste stabilization and production of methane as a renewable energy. However, the process is under-utilized due to operational challenges. Organic overload or toxicants can stress the microbial community that performs waste degradation, resulting in system failure. In addition, not all methanogenic microbial communities are equally capable of consistent, maximum biogas production. Opinion varies as to which parameters should be used to monitor the fitness of digester biomass. No standard molecular tools are currently in use to monitor and compare full-scale operations. It was hypothesized that determining the number of gene copies …