Anaerobic Digesters Targeted Locus (Loci). bioreactor metagenome

We investigate the effect of small external perturbations on the microbial network in anaerobic digesters operated in ordinary conditions. We used four reactors, two of which were perturbed. The experiment was performed twice using different conditions to increase the generality of the results. The first experiment used a simple synthetic substrate and a seed inoculum from an ethanol-degrading reactor. The second experiment used a more complex substrate based on milk and wine and the seed inoculum was a mixture of anaerobic digesters. The structure of the microbial community was characterized by fingerprinting and pyrosequencing.