Eco-Systems Biology of Natural Lipid-Accumulating Microbial Communities

Biological wastewater treatment represents arguably the most widely used biotechnological process on Earth. Due to its high organic load, wastewater represents a potentially interesting energy commodity that is currently not exploited comprehensively. Molecules of particular interest for sustainable bioenergy production are lipids which represent up to 45 % of the organic fraction of wastewater. Within biological wastewater treatment plants, specific lipid accumulating organism (LAO) communities exhibit specialized phenotypes that might be harnessed for the concomitant treatment of wastewater and the production of biodiesel (long chain fatty acid (LCFA) methyl esters). Furthermore, due to the unusual high-density enrichments in the LAO communities, these represent ideal models for the development of relevant high-resolution ecosystems biology methodologies.
The main aims are: determining the exact genetic inventories required for excess lipid uptake, storage and processing within lipid accumulating bacterial populations ; determining the metabolic fate of organic molecules (lipids) within LAO communities ; and determining the functional organisation in relation to genetic heterogeneity of lipid accumulating bacterial populations.