Thermophilic fermentation of sugarcane vinasse: Process flexibility explained through characterizing microbial community and predicting metabolic functions

Thermophilic (55C) dark fermentation is currently the main biotechnological approachstudied to recover value-added products (biohydrogen and organic acids) from sugarcanevinasse within the context of two-stage anaerobic digestion. Although practical results showthat this process offers a great metabolic flexibility, the understanding on the microbesinvolved in substrate conversion is still full of gaps. The microbial communities of fourthermophilic fixed-bed vinasse-fed fermentative reactors were analyzed by 16S rRNA geneamplicon sequencing. A functional prediction was also made by aligning the marker gene datawith reference genomes deposited in databases.