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.
