TY - JOUR
T1 - Inoculum composition determines microbial community and function in an anaerobic sequential batch reactor
AU - Perrotta, Allison R.
AU - Kumaraswamy, Rajkumari
AU - Bastidas-Oyanedel, Juan R.
AU - Alm, Eric J.
AU - Rodríguez, Jorge
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the MIT BioMicro Center for assistance with sequencing. A.R.P., J.R.B-O. and R.K. were funded under the Masdar Institute/MIT joint research program grant 11WAMA1. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences of the NIH under award P30-ES002109 funded sequencing efforts through the MIT BioMicro Center.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Perrotta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2017/2
Y1 - 2017/2
N2 - The sustainable recovery of resources from wastewater streams can provide many social and environmental benefits. A common strategy to recover valuable resources from wastewater is to harness the products of fermentation by complex microbial communities. In these fermentation bioreactors high microbial community diversity within the inoculum source is commonly assumed as sufficient for the selection of a functional microbial community. However, variability of the product profile obtained from these bioreactors is a persistent challenge in this field. In an attempt to address this variability, the impact of inoculum on the microbial community structure and function within the bioreactor was evaluated using controlled laboratory experiments. In the course of this work, sequential batch reactors were inoculated with three complex microbial inocula and the chemical and microbial compositions were monitored by HPLC and 16S rRNA amplicon analysis, respectively. Microbial community dynamics and chemical profiles were found to be distinct to initial inoculate and highly reproducible. Additionally we found that the generation of a complex volatile fatty acid profile was not specific to the diversity of the initial microbial inoculum. Our results suggest that the composition of the original inoculum predictably contributes to bioreactor community structure and function.
AB - The sustainable recovery of resources from wastewater streams can provide many social and environmental benefits. A common strategy to recover valuable resources from wastewater is to harness the products of fermentation by complex microbial communities. In these fermentation bioreactors high microbial community diversity within the inoculum source is commonly assumed as sufficient for the selection of a functional microbial community. However, variability of the product profile obtained from these bioreactors is a persistent challenge in this field. In an attempt to address this variability, the impact of inoculum on the microbial community structure and function within the bioreactor was evaluated using controlled laboratory experiments. In the course of this work, sequential batch reactors were inoculated with three complex microbial inocula and the chemical and microbial compositions were monitored by HPLC and 16S rRNA amplicon analysis, respectively. Microbial community dynamics and chemical profiles were found to be distinct to initial inoculate and highly reproducible. Additionally we found that the generation of a complex volatile fatty acid profile was not specific to the diversity of the initial microbial inoculum. Our results suggest that the composition of the original inoculum predictably contributes to bioreactor community structure and function.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85012880362&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0171369
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0171369
M3 - Article
C2 - 28196102
AN - SCOPUS:85012880362
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 12
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 2
M1 - e0171369
ER -
