Fast and easy quantitative characterization of methanotroph–photoautotroph cocultures

Abstract

Recent research has demonstrated that synthetic methanotroph–photoautotroph cocultures offer a highly promising route to convert biogas into value‐added products. However, there is a lack of techniques for fast and accurate characterization of cocultures, such as determining the individual biomass concentration of each organism in real‐time. To address this unsolved challenge, we propose an experimental–computational protocol for fast, easy, and accurate quantitative characterization of the methanotroph–photoautotroph cocultures. Besides determining the individual biomass concentration of each organism in the coculture, the protocol can also obtain the individual consumption and production rates of O2 and CO2 for the methanotroph and photoautotroph, respectively. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed protocol was demonstrated using two model coculture pairs, Methylomicrobium alcaliphilum 20ZR–Synechococcus sp. PCC7002 that prefers high pH high salt condition, and Methylococcus capsulatus–Chlorella sorokiniana that prefers low salt and neutral pH medium. The performance of the proposed protocol was compared with a flow cytometry‐based cell counting approach. The experimental results show that the proposed protocol is much easier to carry out and delivers faster and more accurate results in measuring individual biomass concentration than the cell counting approach without requiring any special equipment.

Mixotrophic Cultivation of Microalgae Using Biogas as the Substrate

“…To explore the organic matter release of M. bryophila, we consider all kinds of released organic matter as extracellular carbon (EC) and establish a stoichiometric equation of methanotrophic growth as eq (improved on Badr et al)­ where C biomass denotes carbon in biomass and Y a/b denotes the stoichiometric coefficients between a and b , which were fitted based on the substrate consumption of M. bryophila growth in Experiment 3 (Figure a).…”

“…To explore the organic matter release of M. bryophila, we consider all kinds of released organic matter as extracellular carbon (EC) and establish a stoichiometric equation of methanotrophic growth as eq 2 (improved on Badr et al 16 ) (2)…”

Matlab implementation of a novel semi-structured kinetic model for methanotroph-photoautotroph cocultures

“…The semi-structured kinetic model requires coculture growth condition to start the simulation, which includes gas composition (volume percentage of CH 4 , CO 2 and O 2 ), light intensity ( I 0 , ), volume of liquid and gas phase (L), initial individual biomass concentration (gDCW/L), duration of growth and the initial total inorganic carbon in liquid (mmol/L) [ 5 ].…”

“…In this work, we lump various forms of dissolved CO 2 together and term it “the total dissolved CO 2 ” that can be tracked experimentally by measuring total inorganic carbon (TIC) of the liquid sample. The background TIC contained in the culture medium was measured and provided as part of the initialization [ 5 ].…”