TEMPERATURE INFLUENCE ON THE ENRICHMENT AND ACTIVITY OF POLYHYDROXYALKANOATE-SYNTHESIZING MIXED MICROBIAL CULTURES

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are popular biopolymers due to their potential use as biodegradable thermoplastics. They could conceivably be a sustainable substitute for conventional petroleum-based plastics, but their production is currently not economically competitive and research has focused on the optimization of mixed microbial cultures to reduce costs. In this study, three aerobic sequencing batch reactors (SBRs) were operated identically except for the temperatures, which were set at 15C, 35C and 48C. The reactors were subjected to a feast-famine feeding regime to enrich for a PHA-accumulating microbial consortium and the biomass was sampled for 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of both DNA (during the acclimatization phase) and cDNA (during the enrichment and accumulation phases).