Monitoring of microbial communities in anaerobic digestion sludge for biogas optimisation

This study characterised and compared the microbial communities of anaerobic digestion (AD) sludge using three different methods - (1) Clone library; (2) Pyrosequencing; and (3) Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP). Although high-throughput sequencing techniques are becoming increasingly popular and affordable, the reliance of such techniques for frequent monitoring of microbial communities may be a financial burden for some. Furthermore, the depth of microbial analysis revealed by high-throughput sequencing may not be required for monitoring purposes. This study aims to develop a rapid, reliable and economical approach for the monitoring of microbial communities in AD sludge. A combined approach where genetic information of sequences from clone library was used to assign phylogeny to T-RFs determined experimentally was developed in this study. In order to assess the effectiveness of the combined approach, microbial communities determined by the combined approach was compared to that characterised by pyrosequencing. Results showed that both pyrosequencing and clone library methods determined the dominant bacteria phyla to be Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, and Thermotogae. Both methods also found that sludge A and B were predominantly dominated by acetogenic methanogens followed by hydrogenotrophic methanogens. The number of OTUs detected by T-RFLP was significantly lesser than that detected by the clone library. In this study, T-RFLP analysis identified majority of the dominant species of the archaeal consortia. However, many of the more highly diverse bacteria consortia were missed. Nevertheless, the combined approach developed in this study where clone sequences from the clone library were used to assign phylogeny to T-RFs determined experimentally managed to accurately predict the same dominant microbial groups for both sludge A and sludge B, as compared to the pyrosequencing results. Results showed that the combined approach of clone library and T-RFLP accurately predicted the dominant microbial groups and thus is a reliable and more economical way to monitor the evolution of microbial systems in AD sludge.