Seemingly trivial secondary factors may determine microbial competition: a cautionary tale on the impact of iron supplementation through corrosion

Microbial community engineering aims for enrichment of a specific microbial trait by imposing specific cultivation conditions. This work demonstrates that things may be more complicated than typically presumed and that microbial competition can be affected by seemingly insignificant variables, like in this case the type of acid used for pH...

Product Inhibition and pH Affect Stoichiometry and Kinetics of Chain Elongating Microbial Communities in Sequencing Batch Bioreactors

Anaerobic microbial communities can produce carboxylic acids of medium chain length (e.g., caproate, caprylate) by elongating short chain fatty acids through reversed β-oxidation. Ethanol is a common electron donor for this process. The influence of environmental conditions on the stoichiometry and kinetics of ethanol-based chain elongation...

Experimental infrastructure requirements for quantitative research on microbial communities

Natural microbial communities are composed of a large diversity of interacting microorganisms, each with a specific role in the functional properties of the ecosystem. The objectives in microbial ecology research are related to identifying, understanding and exploring the role of these different microorganisms. Because of the rapidly...

Simultaneous growth and poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) accumulation in a Plasticicumulans acidivorans dominated enrichment culture

The wide variety of organic carbon to nitrogen and phosphorous ratios that are encountered in different wastewaters has a major impact on the poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) accumulation potential of microbial communities. In this study we investigated the influence of the substrate composition in terms of the carbon to nitrogen (C/N) or...

O₂ versus N₂O respiration in a continuous microbial enrichment

Despite its ecological importance, essential aspects of microbial N₂O reduction—such as the effect of O₂ availability on the N₂O sink capacity of a community—remain unclear. We studied N₂O vs. aerobic respiration in a chemostat culture to explore (i) the extent to which simultaneous respiration of N...