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Applied Sciences
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Microbiological Surveillance of Biogas and Sewage Treatment Plants
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Microbiological Surveillance of Biogas and Sewage Treatment Plants

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 January 2022) | Viewed by 7336

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Bettina Muller

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
The Department of Molecular Sciences, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Almas Allé 8, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden
Interests: anaerobic microbiology and biotechnology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biogas production through anaerobic digestion technologies can significantly contribute to the complete transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a bio-economy relying on renewable resources. The goals of meeting future energy demands and avoiding competition between food and energy production require an increase in both the quantity and diversity of organic waste streams to be treated. In order to make biogas generation from organic waste streams competitive with fossil fuels and other renewable energies and to minimize the risk of spreading biohazards, reliable monitoring and surveillance systems are required.

This Special Issue is intended to provide a platform for the dissemination of research results that can contribute to process monitoring and surveillance, as well as to the development of reliable control systems to predict, recognize, and respond to process inefficiencies and disturbances and to avoid the distribution of contaminants. Research can include, but is not limited to, the following topics:

  • Assessment of phages, pathogens, viruses, antibiotic-resistant genes, heavy metals, and other biohazards in the biogas processes and digestate residues;
  • Improved/novel tools for monitoring/surveillance of the microbial community and chemical process parameters;
  • Process modeling.

Dr. Bettina Muller
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • anaerobic digestion
  • biogas production
  • organic waste streams
  • organic residues
  • monitoring
  • surveillance
  • process modeling
  • antibiotic-resistant genes
  • pathogens
  • viruses
  • heavy metals
  • microbial community

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 6626 KiB  
Article
Complementary Substrates-Brewery Wastewater and Piggery Effluent—Assessment and Microbial Community Profiling in a Hybrid Anaerobic Reactor
by Ana Eusébio, André Neves and Isabel Paula Marques
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(10), 4364; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app11104364 - 11 May 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1445
Abstract
A hybrid anaerobic reactor was operated under the complementary effluents concept to reduce the unbalanced/inhibitory capacity of the provided piggery effluent. Brewery wastewater was chosen to complement piggery effluent (60:40% v/v, respectively). The HRT reduction from 6.7 to 3.0 days [...] Read more.
A hybrid anaerobic reactor was operated under the complementary effluents concept to reduce the unbalanced/inhibitory capacity of the provided piggery effluent. Brewery wastewater was chosen to complement piggery effluent (60:40% v/v, respectively). The HRT reduction from 6.7 to 3.0 days allowed the testing of an organic load increase from 4.5 to 10.0 g COD/L·d, which resulted in the almost doubling of biogas production. Biogas volumes (1.2 and 2.1 L/L·d, respectively) associated with its quality (>77% CH4) revealed that the hybrid anaerobic reactor responded positively to the operational changes and that piggery effluent can be advantageously digested using the brewery wastewater as the complementary effluent. The unit bottom and the packing bed were the main functional sections recognized in the hybrid. At the beginning of anaerobic digestion, bacterial populations belonged mostly to Bacteroidales (33%) and Clostridiales (35%). The process stability and the biogas quality at 3-d HRT were related to a change in the structure composition, since Flavobacteriales (18%), Bacillales (7%), Pseudomonadales (11%) and members of the Alcaligenaceae family (5%) also integrated the microbial communities. An evident change had also occurred in archaeal populations at this phase. Methanosaeta became the dominant genus (95%), confirming that acetoclastic methanogenesis was the main way for methane production. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microbiological Surveillance of Biogas and Sewage Treatment Plants)
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17 pages, 2013 KiB  
Article
Structure of Microbial Communities When Complementary Effluents Are Anaerobically Digested
by Ana Eusébio, André Neves and Isabel Paula Marques
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(3), 1293; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app11031293 - 01 Feb 2021
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1934
Abstract
Olive oil and pig productions are important industries in Portugal that generate large volumes of wastewater with high organic load and toxicity, raising environmental concerns. The principal objective of this study is to energetically valorize these organic effluents—piggery effluent and olive mill wastewater—through [...] Read more.
Olive oil and pig productions are important industries in Portugal that generate large volumes of wastewater with high organic load and toxicity, raising environmental concerns. The principal objective of this study is to energetically valorize these organic effluents—piggery effluent and olive mill wastewater—through the anaerobic digestion to the biogas/methane production, by means of the effluent complementarity concept. Several mixtures of piggery effluent were tested, with an increasing percentage of olive mill wastewater. The best performance was obtained for samples of piggery effluent alone and in admixture with 30% of OMW, which provided the same volume of biogas (0.8 L, 70% CH4), 63/75% COD removal, and 434/489 L CH4/kg SVin, respectively. The validation of the process was assessed by molecular evaluation through Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) of the 16S rRNA gene. The structure of the microbial communities for both samples, throughout the anaerobic process, was characterized by the predominance of bacterial populations belonging to the phylum Firmicutes, mainly Clostridiales, with Bacteroidetes being the subdominant populations. Archaea populations belonging to the genus Methanosarcina became predominant throughout anaerobic digestion, confirming the formation of methane mainly from acetate, in line with the greatest removal of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) in these samples. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microbiological Surveillance of Biogas and Sewage Treatment Plants)
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14 pages, 2643 KiB  
Article
Abundance Tracking by Long-Read Nanopore Sequencing of Complex Microbial Communities in Samples from 20 Different Biogas/Wastewater Plants
by Christian Brandt, Erik Bongcam-Rudloff and Bettina Müller
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(21), 7518; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app10217518 - 26 Oct 2020
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3539
Abstract
Anaerobic digestion (AD) has long been critical technology for green energy, but the majority of the microorganisms involved are unknown and are currently not cultivable, which makes abundance tracking difficult. Developments in nanopore long-read sequencing make it a promising approach for monitoring microbial [...] Read more.
Anaerobic digestion (AD) has long been critical technology for green energy, but the majority of the microorganisms involved are unknown and are currently not cultivable, which makes abundance tracking difficult. Developments in nanopore long-read sequencing make it a promising approach for monitoring microbial communities via metagenomic sequencing. For reliable monitoring of AD via long reads, we established a robust protocol for obtaining less fragmented, high-quality DNA, while preserving bacteria and archaea composition, for a broad range of different biogas reactors. Samples from 20 different biogas/wastewater reactors were investigated, and a median of 20.5 Gb sequencing data per nanopore flow cell was retrieved for each reactor using the developed DNA isolation protocol. The nanopore sequencing data were compared against Illumina sequencing data while using different taxonomic indices for read classifications. The Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB) index allowed sufficient characterisation of the abundance of bacteria and archaea in biogas reactors with a dramatic improvement (1.8- to 13-fold increase) in taxonomic classification compared to the RefSeq index. Both technologies performed similarly in taxonomic read classification with a slight advantage for Illumina in regard to the total proportion of classified reads. However, nanopore sequencing data revealed a higher genus richness after classification. Metagenomic read classification via nanopore provides a promising approach to monitor the abundance of taxa present in a microbial AD community as an alternative to 16S ribosomal RNA studies or Illumina Sequencing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microbiological Surveillance of Biogas and Sewage Treatment Plants)
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