Food processing wastewater microbial isolates

Food processing wastewater (FPWW), though often discarded by industries, holds great potential as a microbial resource for isolating beneficial microbes. Under the circular economy paradigm, valorisation of FPWW has been rapidly gaining attention. However, the genetic capacity of microbes from FPWW remains to be uncovered. Isolation of microbes and analysis of the whole genome of individual microbial isolates allow scientists to discover and investigate novel microorganisms with beneficial functionalities. Here, we isolated a diversity of bacterial and fungal isolates from two sources of food processing wastewater (soybean and brewery industries) and four microbial protein bioreactors fed with soybean wastewater, using the streak plate method. We report new WGS datasets of twenty four isolates, of which eighteen bacterial isolates have near-complete assemblies (MIMAG high quality criteria). Five out of six fungal isolates showed high BUSCO completeness score above 90%, while one fungal isolate had a low BUSCO completeness score. This dataset provides a valuable foundational resource for exploring genomic capacities and assisting the discovery of novel microbes with beneficial functionalities.