Anaerobic digester has emerged as a technology of choice in management of waste and production of biogas. However, the microbial ecology of digesters utilizing various substrates are very poorly understood. The ecology of anaerobic digester utilizing Citrullus lanatus fruit waste was analyzed using metagenomics. Slurry substrate sample was collected from a functional digester aseptically and anaerobically. Metagenomic DNA was extracted using ZYMO DNA extraction Kit (Model D 6001, Zymo Research, USA) following manufacturer’s instruction. Extracted DNA was amplified using the 16S rRNA gene amplicon PCR primers set and sequenced using Illumina MiSeq platform. Taxonomic analysis of the reads was performed using NCBI-BLAST-2.2.24 and CLC bio Genomics workbench v7.5.1. Taxonomic classification of the sequences revealed that bacteria and archae were the top two kingdoms with reads counts of 57,554 and 80, respectively. The top 7 phyla were Unknown, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Planctomycetes, Bacteroidetes, Actinobacteria and Euryarchaeota in decreasing order of counts. A total of 30 microbial classes, 43 orders, 79 families and 210 species were further classified. Over half of the 210 species detected were not routinely cultured species in the laboratory, indicating that there is still a relatively wide gap between culturable and non-culturable species in an anaerobic digester. The Acidogens captured in this study were Clostridium, Uncultured rumen bacteria and Bacteroidetes species. Furthermore, we also detected uncultured syntrophic Acetogens such as Syntrophomonas species and the hydrogenotrophic thermophile, Methanothermobacter sp. The Syntrophomonas species is known to breakdown short chain fatty acids, like propionate and butanoate in concert with hydrogenotrophic Methanogens indicating methane generation was via the hydrogenotrophic route. However, the main representative hydrogenotrophic methanogens detected were Methanoculleus bourgensis and Methanoculleus marisnigri, with the former being more abundant. In addition to the aforementioned species, other species captured were largely classified as unknown or uncultured species and they include Uncultured species of Clostridium, Syntrophomonas, Synergistetes, Synergistaceae Anaerobic sp, Ruminococcaceae, Rumen sp, Thermomonas, Thermoanaerobacteriales, Bacterium, Compost, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Clostriaceae, Acetobacter. Eubacterium, Alpha and Aacteroides. The results of the study revealed that culture-independent approach is better able to capture the anaerobes including both culturable and unknown that dominate anaerobic digesters and are responsible for the bioconversion of organic waste into biogas.
