Bacterial community changes during composting of municipal crop waste using low technology methods as revealed by 16S rRNA1* and Department
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Date
2018
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology
Abstract
Bacterial communities are actively involved in composting process but the environment within the
compost influences their diversity, abundance and succession. In this study, the authors investigated
the bacterial communities in tropical crop waste compost using pyrosequencing. Municipal crop
wastes from the tropics (Uganda) were composted under four different low-technology methods.
Samples were collected from the early thermophilic, late thermophilic, and mesophilic phases, and from
mature compost. Pyrosequencing of the amplified variable V4 region of the 16s rDNA generated over
110 000 sequences. Chao1 and cluster analysis at 3% dissimilarity showed that bacterial community
richness declined during the composting process. The community was dominated by a few bacterial
taxa during the thermophilic phases. Species evenness increased as compost progressed to maturity
despite a decline in the number of taxa over the successional progression. Bacterial community
diversity, abundance and succession changed with the composting method. This pattern of diversity
may be attributed to competition and selection during the microbial succession. A total of 22 phyla and
513 genera were identified from all the methods in the entire composting process. The most abundant
phyla were Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteriodes and Actinobacteria. Pyrosequencing provided more
information on compost bacterial community diversity and abundance than previously used molecular
methods. Several novel bacteria existing in tropical crop waste compost remained unclassified.
Description
Keywords
16S rRNA, succession, compost, bacterial community, pyrosequencing.
Citation
Tumuhairwe, J. B., & Tenywa, J. S. (2018). Bacterial community changes during composting of municipal crop waste using low technology methods as revealed by 16S rRNA. African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 12(6), 209-221. https://doi.org/10.5897/AJEST2018.2479