Project description:The functional diversity of soil microbial communities was explored for a poplar plantation, which was treated solely with biogas slurry, or combined with biochar at different fertilization intensities over several years.
Project description:Anaerobic degradation (AD) of heterogeneous agricultural substrates is a complex process involving a diverse microbial community. While microbial community composition of a variety of biogas plants (BPs) is well described, little is known about metabolic processes and microbial interaction patterns. Here, we analyzed 16 large-scale BPs using metaproteomics. All metabolic steps of AD were observed in the metaproteome, and multivariate analyses indicated that they were shaped by temperature, pH, volatile fatty acid content and substrate types. Biogas plants can be subdivided into hydrogenotrophic, acetoclastic or a mixture of both methanogenic pathways based on their process parameters, taxonomic and functional metaproteome. Network analyses showed large differences in metabolic and microbial interaction patterns. Both, number of interactions and interaction partners were highly dependent on the prevalent methanogenic pathway for most species. Nevertheless, we observed a highly conserved metabolism of different abundant Pseudomonas spp. for all BPs indicating a key role during AD in carbohydrate hydrolysis irrespectively of variabilities in substrate input and process parameters. Thus, Pseudomonas spp. are of high importance for robust and versatile AD food webs, which highlight a large variety of downstream metabolic processes for their respective methanogenic pathways.
Project description:Meta-proteomics analysis approach in the application of biogas production from anaerobic digestion has many advantages that has not been fully uncovered yet. This study aims to investigate biogas production from a stable 2-stage chicken manure fermentation system in chemical and biological perspective. The diversity and functional protein changes from the 1st stage to 2nd stage is a good indication to expose the differential metabolic processes in anaerobic digestion. The highlight of identified functional proteins explain the causation of accumulated ammonia and carbon sources for methane production. Due to the ammonia stress and nutrient limitation, the hydrogenotrophic methanogenic pathway is adopted as indicative of meta-proteomics data involving the key methanogenic substrates (formate and acetate). Unlike traditional meta-genomic analysis, this study could provide both species names of microorganism and enzymes to directly point the generation pathway of methane and carbon dioxide in investigating biogas production of chicken manure.
Project description:Methanogenesis allows methanogenic archaea (methanogens) to generate cellular energy for their growth while producing methane. Hydrogenotrophic methanogens thrive on carbon dioxide and molecular hydrogen as sole carbon and energy sources. Thermophilic and hydrogenotrophic Methanothermobacter spp. have been recognized as robust biocatalysts for a circular carbon economy and are now applied in power-to-gas technology. Here, we generated the first manually curated genome-scale metabolic reconstruction for three Methanothermobacter spp.. We investigated differences in growth performance and gas consumption/production of three wild-type strains and one genetically engineered strain in two independent quadruplicate chemostat bioreactor experiments: 1) with molecular hydrogen and carbon dioxide; and 2) with sodium formate. In the first experiment, we found the highest methane production rate for Methanothermobacter thermautotrophicus ΔH, while Methanothermobacter marburgensis Marburg reached the highest biomass growth rate. We collected statistically reliable transcriptomics and proteomics data sets from these steady-state bioreactors, which we integrated within our genome-scale metabolic models. The implementation of an pan-model that contains combined reactions from all three microbes allowed us to perform an interspecies comparison of the complete omics data set. While the observed differences in the growth behavior cannot be fully explained, the comparison enabled us to identify crucial differences in growth-related pathways, such as formate anabolism. In the second experiment, we found stable growth with a M. thermautotrophicus ΔH plasmid-carrying strain on formate with similar performance parameters compared to wild-type Methanothermobacter thermautotrophicus Z-245. The results of the two studies demonstrate the advantages of an integrative approach using fermentation and omics data with genome-scale modeling for the investigation of lesser studied metabolisms, and the biotechnological potential of Methanothermobacter spp. as production platform hosts.