Phylogenetic Analysis of Anaerobic Co-Digestion of Animal Manure and Corn Stover Reveals Linkages between Bacterial Communities and Digestion Performance

Abstract

Over 3 million tons of manures are produced annually in the United States and pose environmental and health risks if not remediated. Anaerobic digestion is an effective method in treating organic wastes to reduce environmental impacts and produce methane as an alternative energy. Previous studies suggested that optimization of feed composition, hydraulic retention time, and other operational conditions can greatly improve total solids removal and increase methane productivity. These environmental factors improve functionality by altering the microbial community structure but explicit details of how the bacterial community shifts are poorly understood. Our investigations were conducted to investigate the relationship between environmental factors, microbial community structure and bioreactor efficiency by using metagenomic analysis of the microbial communities. Our results indicated that the bioreactor with the greatest methane production, digestion efficiency and reduced levels of E. coli / Shigella had a distinctive community structure at the genus level with unique and abundant uncultivated strains of Bacteroidetes. Moreover the same bioreactor was enriched in Aminomonas paucivorans and Clostridia populations that can utilize secondary metabolites produced during cellulose/hemicellulose degradation to generate hydrogen and acetate. Hence specific digestion conditions that enrich for these populations may provide a route to the optimization of co-digestion systems and control the variability in reactor performance.