Microbial Community Dynamics in Anaerobic Digesters for Biogas Production

Microbial communities including bacteria and archaea in anaerobic digestion (AD) process play a crucial role in biogas production. In microbial communities, a deep understanding is required related to microbial diversity, composition, abundance, interactions, and its behavior to produce biogas. In addition, their active genes, proteins, and active metabolic products also enhance the productivity of AD process. Increased valuable products and biogas production can be carried out by optimizing the process parameters. The optimization can be visually seen by microbial diversity by performing metagenomic, meta-transcriptomic, meta-proteomic, and metabolomic data. However, the abundance and diversity of microbial communities are easily evaluated by high-throughput sequencing and a suitable bioinformatics analysis which are critically important for overall process. This chapter includes the microbial diversity and abundance presented in various bioreactors, process optimization factors and its impact on the biogas production. Thus, metagenomic data-based fermentation or AD can be proposed by integrating the bioinformatic data of microbial communities with their performance on the anaerobic digesters to facilitate the process improvement and higher generation of energy and value-added products.