School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia.
School of Chemical Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 5;13(1):12703. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-39991-w.
Anaerobic digestion is widely used to process and recover value from food waste. Commercial food waste anaerobic digestion facilities seek improvements in process efficiency to enable higher throughput. There is limited information on the composition of microbial communities in food waste prior to digestion, limiting rational exploitation of the catalytic potential of microorganisms in pretreatment processes. To address this knowledge gap, bacterial and fungal communities in food waste samples from a commercial anaerobic digestion facility were characterised over 3 months. The abundance of 16S rRNA bacterial genes was approximately five orders of magnitude higher than the abundance of the fungal intergenic spacer (ITS) sequence, suggesting the numerical dominance of bacteria over fungi in food waste before anaerobic digestion. Evidence for the mass proliferation of bacteria in food waste during storage prior to anaerobic digestion is presented. The composition of the bacterial community shows variation over time, but lineages within the Lactobacillaceae family are consistently dominant. Nitrogen content and pH are correlated to community variation. These findings form a foundation for understanding the microbial ecology of food waste and provide opportunities to further improve the throughput of anaerobic digestion.
厌氧消化被广泛用于处理和回收食物垃圾中的价值。商业食物垃圾厌氧消化设施寻求提高工艺效率，以实现更高的吞吐量。在消化之前，关于食物垃圾中微生物群落的组成的信息有限，限制了在预处理过程中对微生物催化潜力的合理利用。为了弥补这一知识空白，对来自商业厌氧消化设施的食物垃圾样本中的细菌和真菌群落进行了 3 个月的特征描述。16S rRNA 细菌基因的丰度约为真菌种间间隔（ITS）序列丰度的五个数量级，表明在厌氧消化之前，细菌在食物垃圾中数量上超过真菌。提出了在厌氧消化之前的储存过程中，食物垃圾中细菌大量增殖的证据。细菌群落的组成随时间变化而变化，但乳杆菌科内的类群始终占主导地位。氮含量和 pH 值与群落变化相关。这些发现为理解食物垃圾的微生物生态学奠定了基础，并为进一步提高厌氧消化的吞吐量提供了机会。
