Bioaugmentation of psychrophilic methanogenic microbial consortia on psychrophilic anaerobic digestion of maize stovers

Abstract: A large number of maize stover can be generated per year in recent years. Sustainable treatments of maize stover can be expected to produce the renewable energy. Among them, anaerobic digestion is a friendly biotechnology to recover the renewable energy from maize stover. Especially, the psychrophilic anaerobic digestion can only require less energy input, compared with the commonly-used mesophilic and thermophilic digestors. However, a psychrophilic environment can inhibit the microbial activity, causing the low efficiency of methane production. In this study, the bioaugmentation of psychrophilic propionate-degrading consortia (the mixture of propionic-degrading consortia and acetogenic methanogen) was conducted to boost the anaerobic digestion of corn straw in psychrophilic batch reactors, with the different dosages of 3%, 6%, 9%, 12%, 15%, and 18% at low temperature (20°C). The concentrated indigenous inoculum with the dosage of 18% was introduced as the control. The reactor performance, microbial metabolites, and microbial community dynamics were analyzed to investigate the optimum dosage and mechanism. The results showed that the bioaugmentation consortia was improve the methane production rate under a psychrophilic anaerobic environment, as evidenced by 1.3 to 2.4 times increase in the bioaugmented groups, compared with the control (without bioaugmentation). The bioaugmentation dosage in the range of 3% to 12% was positively correlated with the methane yields. The optimal dose was 12%, with the methane yields of 134.1 mL/g VS. The accumulative methane yield was 1.4 times higher than that of the control. By contrast, there was no increase in the methane yields within the higher bioaugmentation dosage (i.e., 15%-18%). The modified Gompertz model showed that the concentrated indigenous inoculum was reduced the lag phase from 12.5 to 3.50 days, indicating the necessity of bioaugmentation with the key microbial consortia to boost the methane yields. Bioaugmentation inocula with the propionate-degrading consortia was shorten the lag phase from 12.5 to 0.716 days, whereas, there was the increase in the maximum methane production rate from 2.45 to 17.93 mL CH4/(gVS·d). Meanwhile, the psychrophilic environment was caused the acetate accumulation up to 4.43 g/L. At the same time, the propionate concentrations were kept at 3.88 g/L in the control reactor in the whole experimental process. Conversely, the bioaugmentation with psychrotrophic propionate-degrading consortia was accelerated the VFAs degradations, especially the acetate and propionate, which was 53.03%-90.71% less than that of the control reactor. Moreover, the acetate and propionate were fully degraded within the first 9 days in the bioaugmented reactors with 9%-15% dosage, indicating the important role of bioaugmented consortia in the scavenging propionate and acetate. Microbial analysis showed that the bioaugmentation increased the relative abundance of taxa (e.g., Proteocatella, Smithella, Peptococcaceae) for the hydrolysis and acetogenesis process. The dominant methanogens in the bioaugmented reactors were represented by acetoclastic methanogens (i.e., Methanothrix and Methanosarcina) and hydrogenotrophic methanogen (Methanobrevibacter), indicating the key contributions to increase the methane yield under psychrotrophic environment. Consequently, the bioaugmentation consortia can generate a domino effect, where acetate levels were reduced first and other VFAs degradation became thermodynamics feasible, leading to the balance between VFAs degradation and methane production. This finding can provide the evidence and guidance to improve the psychrophilic anaerobic digestion through bioaugmentation.