Ple­ase Mind the Gap: Brin­ging Micro­bial Struc­ture and Func­tion Across Tem­pe­ra­ture Regi­mes in Anae­ro­bic Diges­tion

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Seminar of the Department of Microbiology

 

Hector Salvador Cairos Regalado – PhD candidate – UIBK   

12.03.2026, 11:00 - Hybrid

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  • or in presence: Seminarraum Biologie - Foyer (Technikerstraße 25, Viktor-Franz-Hess Haus, Parterre).

 

Abstract

Optimising the biogas production process is vital to advancing the development of sustainable waste-to-energy technology to promote sustainability and reduce dependency on fossil fuels. The main factors that affect the anaerobic digestion (AD) process include temperature, pH, carbon/nitrogen ratio, microbial community composition, ammonia, volatile fatty acid inhibition, and hydraulic retention time. Amongst them, temperature is an important factor that significantly influences microbial community composition, growth, and metabolism by determining preferred biochemical pathways. Temperature affects process stability, substrate degradation rate, and biogas production. According to the optimal growth temperature of microorganisms, anaerobic digestors are normally classified into psychrophilic (15-30°C), mesophilic (30-40°C), and thermophilic (50-60°C). Nowadays, most digesters are operated either under mesophilic (30-40°C) or thermophilic (50-60°C) conditions, both offering specific advantages. Recently, temperature ranges between mesophilic and thermophilic conditions (40°C - 50°C) have gained attention for achieving higher methane yields and thus prompting a reconsideration of traditional temperature regimes for AD. Therefore, my PhD project intends to evaluate the effects of temperature on fed-batch lab-scale digesters (34°C to 61°C), with an emphasis on the temperature gap between conventional mesophilic and thermophilic conditions. This temperature range will be examined at very high resolution with 3°C increments and three different inoculants, and using different omics approaches (metagenomics, meta-transcriptomics, meta-proteomics, and metabolomics) to characterise the prokaryotic communities and main pathways underlying this performance. This will allow me to investigate whether temperature impacts vary due to the inoculum used, as well as whether the optimal temperature is the same for all or if there are substantial variances between them. I seek to gain a better understanding of the prokaryotic species and the key metabolic pathways involved in this bioprocess under the conditions tested. 

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