UnrAD · Unraveling Anaerobic Digestion using Single cell and Long Read Sequencing
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-06-01 → 2023-09-20
- EU contribution
- €172,932
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Unraveling Anaerobic Digestion using Single cell and Long Read Sequencing
The evidence of rapid climate change and environmental deterioration is unequivocal and is compelling governments, industries and citizens to take actions to reverse the situation. Awareness of the need to find clean, renewable energy sources, and have a near-zero waste society, is rising and became a priority in the political agenda of every country. The European Union is not exempt from this concern about reducing our ecological footprint and launched the Green Deal, an initiative with an estimated investment of at least 1 trillion euros aiming to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. The European Green Deal provides an action plan with different objectives to be reached before 2030, such as the reduction by 20% of chemical fertilizer, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% compared to 1990 levels, or the production of up to 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen. One technology that can help to achieve those objectives is anaerobic digestion (AD). AD is a biological process in absence of oxygen, whereby microorganisms break down organic material to generate biogas and a residual known as digestate. The biogas is usually a carbon dioxide and methane mix but the process can be also adapted to produce hydrogen, or other valuable chemical feedstocks with diverse industrial applications. Methane and hydrogen represent clean sources of renewable energy for electricity, heat or transport while the digestate can be used as a nitrogen-rich biofertiliser. Additionally, ecological benefits are obtained when agricultural, domestic or industrial waste, that would otherwise be released to the environment, are used as the substrate for the digestors. Having waste as starting material avoids the use of agricultural commodities that may compete with food production, promotes development of the circular economy, and reduces ocean contamination by stimulating the use of digestible bioplastics. AD is thus transversal directly or indirectly to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Goals 2, 6, 7,11, 12, 13 and 14) and can be seen as one of the clearest examples of how research and innovation can convert a problem into opportunity, or more specifically, turn waste into an ecological and economical asset. The overall objective of this project, UnrAD, is to employ two cutting-edge technologies: sc-RNAseq and 3rd gen. RNAseq to study the role of temperature and Co supplementation in AD, and to identify specializations and interactions among the different bacterial community members underpinning the process.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Anaerobic digestion, a technology able to use waste residuals to produce clean renewable energy in form of methane, is a powerful tool to revert the unequivocal environmental deterioration and represent one of the clearest examples of how research and innovation can turn undesirable residual like waste into an ecological and economical asset. Recent advances made feasible the process at ambient temperature, feasibility that might increase the net production since does not need heat supplementation. Among the different trace metals involved in the anaerobic degradation processes, cobalt has been shown one of the most important since it acts as a cofactor for enzymes involved in the metabolic pathways of the methanogenesis from acetate. Therefore an adequate balance of cobalt could improve the anaerobic biological response, enhancing the rate and yield of methane. High throughput single-cell transcriptomic and third generation sequencing provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand the mechanisms inducing this enhanced yield. The first allows trancriptome analysis at the level of individual cells giving the possibility to understand the interplay of transcripts within single organisms, the specialization of different members from the community or the heterogeneity in term of transcriptomic status of every species while the second enable the possibility recover full length transcripts increasing resolution. The overall objective of UnrAD is to employ these two cutting-edge technologies combined to study the role of temperature and cobalt supplementation in anaerobic digestion and identify specializations and interactions among the different bacterial community members. The findings from this project would lead to a more efficient anaerobic digestion and will be beneficial for the to the industries in the field and the whole society.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS · MadridCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union