Paper enrichment trial from municipal landfill leachate biomass

Landfills are engineered, heterogeneously contaminated sites containing large reservoirs of paper waste. Cellulose degradation is an important process within landfill microbial ecology, and these anoxic, saturated environments are prime locations for discovery of cellulases that may offer improvements on industrial cellulose degradation efforts. Seventeen landfill microorganisms were enriched in a customized leachate medium amended with microcrystalline cellulose or common paper stocks, with three showing competition dynamics in response to the specific composition (lignin:hemi-cellulose:cellulose) of the different paper stocks. There was very little overlap between metagenome-derived predicted cellulolytic organisms, organisms enriched on paper sources, or the isolates, suggesting the landfill cellulolytic community is at low abundance but able to rapidly respond to introduced substrates.