Ammonia effect on food waste anaerobic digestion

Food waste has high organic content that enables it to become an attractive feedstock for anaerobic digestion. However, food waste anaerobic digestion often suffers from a poor performance and instability caused by a high ammonium concentration resulted from a high nitrogen content in the feedstock. This study aimed to trace dynamic changes in microbial populations during food waste digestion adapted to increasing ammonium concentration, using both biofunctional information obtained from radioactive isotope tracer technique, analysis of 16S rRNA amplicons and fluorescence in situ hybridisation.