Print Email Facebook Twitter Absolute Quantification of Individual Biomass Concentrations in a Methanogenic Coculture Title Absolute Quantification of Individual Biomass Concentrations in a Methanogenic Coculture Author Junicke, H. Abbas, B. Oentoro, J. Van Loosdrecht, M. Kleerebezem, R. Faculty Applied Sciences Department BT/Biotechnology Date 2014-04-12 Abstract Identification of individual biomass concentrations is a crucial step towards an improved understanding of anaerobic digestion processes and mixed microbial conversions in general. The knowledge of individual biomass concentrations allows for the calculation of biomass specific conversion rates which form the basis of anaerobic digestion models. Only few attempts addressed the absolute quantification of individual biomass concentrations in methanogenic microbial ecosystems which has so far impaired the calculation of biomass specific conversion rates and thus model validation. This study proposes a quantitative PCR (qPCR) approach for the direct determination of individual biomass concentrations in methanogenic microbial associations by correlating the native qPCR signal (cycle threshold, Ct) to individual biomass concentrations (mg dry matter/L). Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach circumvents error-prone conversion factors that are typically used to convert gene copy numbers or cell concentrations into actual biomass concentrations. The newly developed method was assessed and deemed suitable for the determination of individual biomass concentrations in a defined coculture of Desulfovibrio sp. G11 and Methanospirillum hungatei JF1. The obtained calibration curves showed high accuracy, indicating that the new approach is well suited for any engineering applications where the knowledge of individual biomass concentrations is required. Subject anaerobic digestionqPCRindividual biomass concentrationbiomass specific conversion ratesOA-Fund TU Delft To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6ee66bd6-99e2-4fb5-b622-c3918244e346 DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s13568-014-0035-x Publisher SpringerOpen ISSN 2191-0855 Source http://www.amb-express.com/content/4/1/35 Source AMB Express, 4, 2014 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2014 The Author(s); licensee SpringerThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Files PDF Junicke_2014.pdf 267.18 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:6ee66bd6-99e2-4fb5-b622-c3918244e346/datastream/OBJ/view