Reducing HRT to shape the chain elongation reactor microbiota

Here, we present the microbial community investigation in two continuous anaerobic bioreactors from 16S rRNA gene dynamics in enrichment cultures. By progressively reducing the hydraulic retention time from 8 days to 2 days with different changing modes in both bioreactors operated for 211 days, we achieved higher productivities and yields of the target products n-caproate and n-caprylate. Additionally, six samples were selected for DNA extraction and sequenced using an Illumina Miseq platform (20 million reads per library). After the assembly, we recovered 108 metagenome-assembled genomes.