High Culturability of Bacteria in Commercially Available Personal Composters for Fed-batch Treatment of Household Biowaste

Different types of commercially available personal composters which were designed for repeated fed-batch treatment of garbage were operated for more than one month in order to study microbial populations at the steady state of this process. Both microscopic direct counts and viable plate counts of bacteria recorded had an order of magnitude of 10 11 per g dry weight of solid waste-compost mixture (SCM), and the culturability of the resident bacteria was estimated to be 54% on average. High culturability was also demonstrated by comparative quinone profiling of the SCM itself and bacterial colonies recovered on the plates therefrom. These results sug-gest that conventional cultivation methods work much better for studying microbial community structure in the fed-batch composting process than in natural environments. The colony quinone profiling method may have great promise for the evaluation of culture bias and culturability of in situ microbial populations.

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