Anaerobic digestion of food waste is an attractive and increasingly popular technology within waste management and energy recovery. A better understanding of the microbiology associated with anaerobic digestion of food waste will provide new insight into the operational conditions required for optimizing this process, as well as its potential for utilisation in co-digestion systems. Eighteen full-scale reactors processing varying proportions of food waste under diverse operational configurations were subjected to microbial community analysis by amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA and mcrA genes to capture the bacterial and methanogenic populations. Statistical correlations between microbial populations, plant design and operating conditions revealed that the microbial communities were shaped by operational parameters such as the primary substrate type and operational temperature, while the methanogenic communities showed a more reactor specific distribution. The distribution of microbes based on the waste processed in the surveyed digesters was explored, as well as the presence of specialist populations such as syntrophs and methanogens. Food waste digester communities were not associated with a strong microbial fingerprint compared to other waste types (wastewater and manure) but contained greater abundance and unique syntrophic acetate oxidising populations, suggesting that co-digestion with food waste may improve the functional diversity of anaerobic digesters.

餐厨垃圾的厌氧消化是垃圾管理和能源回收领域中一种有吸引力且日益流行的技术。对与食物残渣厌氧消化有关的微生物学的更好理解将为优化此过程所需的操作条件及其在共消化系统中的利用潜力提供新的见解。通过对16S rRNA和mcrA进行扩增子测序，对18个在不同操作配置下处理不同比例食物垃圾的大型反应器进行了微生物群落分析基因捕获细菌和产甲烷菌种群。微生物种群，工厂设计和运行条件之间的统计相关性表明，微生物群落受操作参数（例如主要底物类型和操作温度）的影响，而产甲烷群落显示出更多的反应器比分布。探索了基于在被调查的消化池中处理的废物的微生物的分布，以及是否存在特殊种群，例如共生菌和产甲烷菌。与其他类型的废物（废水和粪肥）相比，食品废物消化器社区与微生物的指纹图谱并不相关，但其丰度更高，且具有独特的营养性乙酸盐氧化种群，