Diversity of dead bacterial biomass consumers in compost. compost metagenome

The dead bacterial biomass seems a conventional substrate in compost, but there is scarce direct evidence of the metabolic activity of the biomass consumers in the complex compost ecosystems. In this study, we determined the regrowth potential of Escherichia coli in the presence of dead bacterial biomass in compost and identified the biomass metabolizers that grew competitively with E. coli by using high-sensitivity stable isotope probing of rRNA.

死亡细菌生物质（dead bacterial biomass）在堆肥体系中看似是一类常规底物，但在复杂的堆肥生态系统内，有关该生物质消费者的代谢活性的直接实证却极为匮乏。本研究利用高灵敏度核糖体RNA（rRNA）稳定同位素探针（stable isotope probing）技术，测定了堆肥环境中存在死亡细菌生物质时大肠杆菌（Escherichia coli）的再生长潜能，并鉴定出了可与大肠杆菌竞争性增殖的生物质代谢微生物。