Periodic Reporting for period 1 - UnrAD (Unraveling Anaerobic Digestion using Single cell and Long Read Sequencing)
Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2023-05-31
The evidence of rapid climate change and environmental deterioration is unequivocal and is compelling governments, industries and citizens to take actions to reverse the situation. Awareness of the need to find clean, renewable energy sources, and have a near-zero waste society, is rising and became a priority in the political agenda of every country. The European Union is not exempt from this concern about reducing our ecological footprint and launched the Green Deal, an initiative with an estimated investment of at least 1 trillion euros aiming to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. The European Green Deal provides an action plan with different objectives to be reached before 2030, such as the reduction by 20% of chemical fertilizer, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% compared to 1990 levels, or the production of up to 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen. One technology that can help to achieve those objectives is anaerobic digestion (AD).
AD is a biological process in absence of oxygen, whereby microorganisms break down organic material to generate biogas and a residual known as digestate. The biogas is usually a carbon dioxide and methane mix but the process can be also adapted to produce hydrogen, or other valuable chemical feedstocks with diverse industrial applications. Methane and hydrogen represent clean sources of renewable energy for electricity, heat or transport while the digestate can be used as a nitrogen-rich biofertiliser. Additionally, ecological benefits are obtained when agricultural, domestic or industrial waste, that would otherwise be released to the environment, are used as the substrate for the digestors. Having waste as starting material avoids the use of agricultural commodities that may compete with food production, promotes development of the circular economy, and reduces ocean contamination by stimulating the use of digestible bioplastics. AD is thus transversal directly or indirectly to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Goals 2, 6, 7,11, 12, 13 and 14) and can be seen as one of the clearest examples of how research and innovation can convert a problem into opportunity, or more specifically, turn waste into an ecological and economical asset.
The overall objective of this project, UnrAD, is to employ two cutting-edge technologies: sc-RNAseq and 3rd gen. RNAseq to study the role of temperature and Co supplementation in AD, and to identify specializations and interactions among the different bacterial community members underpinning the process.
AD is a biological process in absence of oxygen, whereby microorganisms break down organic material to generate biogas and a residual known as digestate. The biogas is usually a carbon dioxide and methane mix but the process can be also adapted to produce hydrogen, or other valuable chemical feedstocks with diverse industrial applications. Methane and hydrogen represent clean sources of renewable energy for electricity, heat or transport while the digestate can be used as a nitrogen-rich biofertiliser. Additionally, ecological benefits are obtained when agricultural, domestic or industrial waste, that would otherwise be released to the environment, are used as the substrate for the digestors. Having waste as starting material avoids the use of agricultural commodities that may compete with food production, promotes development of the circular economy, and reduces ocean contamination by stimulating the use of digestible bioplastics. AD is thus transversal directly or indirectly to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Goals 2, 6, 7,11, 12, 13 and 14) and can be seen as one of the clearest examples of how research and innovation can convert a problem into opportunity, or more specifically, turn waste into an ecological and economical asset.
The overall objective of this project, UnrAD, is to employ two cutting-edge technologies: sc-RNAseq and 3rd gen. RNAseq to study the role of temperature and Co supplementation in AD, and to identify specializations and interactions among the different bacterial community members underpinning the process.
The multidisciplinary nature of UnrAD as a combination of computational and experimental research required knowledge on very different fields such as genomics, computation, biogas production and microbial ecology. To gain the expertise needed, collaborations with different projects like the programme M2ex were established. Such collaborations led to several publications on high ranked journals and their results were presented in conferences such as the 10th IWA Microbial Ecology and Water Engineering Specialist Conference or the International Congress on Metal-microbe applications to expand the circular economy 2023.
The findings from those collaborations contributed to understand the mechanisms of waste management strategies such as low temperature anaerobic treatment of lipid-rich wastewater for biogas production or metal removal from anaerobic digesters by promoting the production of VFAs; fostering sustainable solutions for dairy processing or animal manure waste management.They also shed light on the specialization of different members from the AD community and how they adapt to changes on temperature and metal abundance.
The findings from those collaborations contributed to understand the mechanisms of waste management strategies such as low temperature anaerobic treatment of lipid-rich wastewater for biogas production or metal removal from anaerobic digesters by promoting the production of VFAs; fostering sustainable solutions for dairy processing or animal manure waste management.They also shed light on the specialization of different members from the AD community and how they adapt to changes on temperature and metal abundance.
The research questions beyond the state-of-the-art which UnrAD will resolve are: (1) Which are the main challenges and the added value of the sequencing techniques employed for the study of microbial processes? (2) How do the main AD bacterial community players interact, and what is their function specialization based on sequencing datasets? (3) Can we use microbial community ‘re-shaping’ and Co supplementation as a means to increase efficiency in AD at ambient temperature?
The main benefits to society derived from this project with be the enhanced production of clean sources of renewable energy produced with AD, a more sustainable waste management, the promotion of circular economy and the reduction of our carbon foot-print.
The main benefits to society derived from this project with be the enhanced production of clean sources of renewable energy produced with AD, a more sustainable waste management, the promotion of circular economy and the reduction of our carbon foot-print.