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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Matthew WadeORCiD, Robert Pattinson, Professor Nick ParkerORCiD, Dr Jan DolfingORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Anaerobic digestion enables the water industry to treat wastewater as a resource for generating energy and recovering valuable by-products. The complexity of the anaerobic digestion process has motivated the development of complex models. However, this complexity makes it intractable to pin-point stability and emergent behaviour. Here, the widely used Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 (ADM1) has been reduced to its very backbone, a syntrophic two-tiered microbial `food chain' and a slightly more complex three-tiered microbial `food web', with their stability analysed as function of the inowing substrate concentration and dilution rate. Parameterised for phenol and chlorophenol degradation, steady- states were always stable and non-oscillatory. Low input concentrations of chlorophenol were sufficient to maintain chlorophenol- and phenol-degrading populations but resulted in poor conversion and a hydrogen flux that was too low to sustain hydrogenotrophic methanogens. The addition of hydrogen and phenol boosted the populations of all three organisms, resulting in the counterintuitive phenomena that (i) the phenol degraders were stimulated by adding hydrogen, even though hydrogen inhibits phenol degradation, and (ii) the dechlorinators indirectly benefitted from measures that stimulated their hydrogenotrophic competitors; both phenomena hint at emergent behaviour.
Author(s): Wade MJ, Pattinson RW, Parker NG, Dolfing J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Theoretical Biology
Year: 2016
Volume: 389
Pages: 171-186
Print publication date: 21/01/2016
Online publication date: 06/11/2015
Acceptance date: 22/10/2015
Date deposited: 23/11/2015
ISSN (print): 0022-5193
ISSN (electronic): 1095-8541
Publisher: Academic Press
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.10.032
DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.10.032
PubMed id: 26551153
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