Finished project:

FLEXIZUCKER

Process engineering, enzymatic and genomic characterization of a flexible biogas production with targeted use of sugar beets

FNR
- research cluster of academic partners in Ulm and Göttingen; funded by the BMEL

The generation of electricity from biogas production is the only form of regenerative energy production that allows flexible supply. An important prerequisite is a cost-efficient feeding management of biogas plants. This project aims at targeted biogas production by quickly available carbohydrates in sugar beet silage. This may ensure that existing biogas plants can participate even more efficiently in the feed-in management of network operators as well as in the energy balancing market.
One important basic requirement for this purpose is that feeding management concentrated on temporally fluctuating biogas production does not interfere with the stability of the microbial community. The necessary adaptations of the microorganisms’ metabolic activities to the demand-oriented operational mode of biogas plants will be determined by comparative analyses of expression patterns and measuring of specific enzyme activities. The direct correlation of metabolic activity with essential process parameters will allow the assessment of the limitations of temporally fluctuating biogas production. A combination of metagenome and metatranscriptome analyses on the basis of high throughput-sequencing technology allows the observation of microbial metabolic activities in correlation to the demand-oriented operational mode. In this project the modification of expression patterns after intermittent addition of sugar beet silage will be analyzed by metagenome and metatranscriptome methods.