title: Reactor performances and microbial communities of biogas reactors: effects of inoculum sources.
abstract: Anaerobic digestion is a very complex process that is mediated by various microorganisms, and the understanding of the microbial community assembly and its corresponding function is critical in order to better control the anaerobic process. The present study investigated the effect of different inocula on the microbial community assembly in biogas reactors treating cellulose with various inocula, and three parallel biogas reactors with the same inoculum were also operated in order to reveal the reproducibility of both microbial communities and functions of the biogas reactors. The results showed that the biogas production, volatile fatty acid (VFA) concentrations, and pH were different for the biogas reactors with different inocula, and different steady-state microbial community patterns were also obtained in different biogas reactors as reflected by Bray-Curtis similarity matrices and taxonomic classification. It indicated that inoculum played an important role in shaping the microbial communities of biogas reactor in the present study, and the microbial community assembly in biogas reactor did not follow the niche-based ecology theory. Furthermore, it was found that the microbial communities and reactor performances of parallel biogas reactors with the same inoculum were different, which could be explained by the neutral-based ecology theory and stochastic factors should played important roles in the microbial community assembly in the biogas reactors. The Bray-Curtis similarity matrices analysis suggested that inoculum affected more on the microbial community assembly compared to stochastic factors, since the samples with different inocula had lower similarity (10-20 %) compared to the samples from the parallel biogas reactors (30 %).
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai, 201418, China.
authors.forename: Sheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai, 201418, China.|Shanghai Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Particle Pollution and Prevention (LAP3), Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China.
authors.forename: Yafeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Particle Pollution and Prevention (LAP3), Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China.
authors.forename: Shicheng
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Shanghai Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Particle Pollution and Prevention (LAP3), Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China. gangl@fudan.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Gang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Luo
mesh_terms: D000693:Anaerobiosis; D056804:Biofuels; D019149:Bioreactors / Q000592:standards*; D002482:Cellulose / Q000378:metabolism; D005232:Fatty Acids, Volatile / Q000032:analysis; D006863:Hydrogen-Ion Concentration; D008697:Methane / Q000378:metabolism; D059013:Microbial Consortia / Q000502:physiology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013696:Temperature; D014865:Waste Disposal, Fluid
chemical_list: D056804:Biofuels; D005232:Fatty Acids, Volatile; D002482:Cellulose; D008697:Methane
keywords: Anaerobic digestion; Biogas production; Inoculum; Microbial community