Microbiology and Biochemistry of Anaerobic Digesters: A Brief Overview

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a unique process where different microbial species decompose organic materials in the absence of oxygen. AD has been widely practiced in full-scale facilities all over the world. Several AD techniques have been applied to convert livestock manures, waste waters, and solid lignocellulosic waste into biogas. Among the different conversion processes of biomass, biological AD gains importance because of its economical and efficient way to recover carbon in the form of renewable biogas fuel. Despite the progress on the engineering of AD systems, pretreatment, the microbiology and reactor configurations create challenging pathways for further advancements in the operation of AD. The complex microbial activities pose constraints on the understanding of the interdependency of the metabolomic versatility of the trophic species