Due to the low trace metals concentration in the Olive Mill Solid Waste (OMSW), a proposed strategy to improve its biomethanization is the supplementation of key metals to enhance the microorganism activity. Among essential trace metals, cobalt has been reported to have a crucial role in anaerobic degradation. This study evaluates the effect of cobalt supplementation to OMSW, focusing on the connection between fractionation of cobalt in the system and the biological response. The highest biological responses was found in a range from 0.018 to 0.035mg/L of dissolved cobalt (0.24-0.65mg total cobalt/L), reaching improvements up to 23% and 30% in the methane production rate and the methane yield coefficient, respectively. It was found that the dissolved cobalt fraction is more accurately related with the biological response than the total cobalt. The total cobalt is distorted by the contribution of dissolved and non-dissolved inert fractions.

White-rot fungi (WRF) are increasingly recognized for their biotechnological potential due to the wide range of applications of ligninolytic enzymes. The addition of different metals involved in the functioning of ligninolytic enzymes, mainly copper and manganese, has been widely studied to maximize the enzymatic activities of the WRF. This review aims to provide information on the effect of metal-fungi interaction mechanisms that justify the effects of enzymatic activity. The addition of copper is associated with increased laccase activity, with reported improvements in the laccase activity compared to controls without metal addition of up to 100% at doses between 0.5–1 mM. The addition of manganese resulted in an improvement in manganese peroxidase activity with respect to the control at the wide range of 1–18.2 mM. Furthermore, enzymatic activity was generally favored by using substrates with lignocellulosic fibers with respect to synthetic culture medium. Quantifying the concentration of metals in the substrate is required to monitor bioavailable metals for fungi in these assays accurately, making an external contribution less necessary.

Byproducts from the winery industry contain many bioactive compounds that are considered high-value-added compounds. White grape pomace (GP) is rich in carbohydrates; consequently, it can be used as a raw material for subsequent bioprocesses. In the present study, low-temperature hydrothermal treatments were carried out using different operational conditions regarding temperature (65–95 °C), time (120–240 min), and sulfuric acid addition at various concentrations (5–15% v/v). The results showed that by using a temperature of 65 °C, a period of 120 min, and 15% (v/v) of H₂SO₄, it was possible to obtain a liquid phase rich in phenols and carbohydrates, with total phenol compounds corresponding to 2113 ± 140 mg of gallic acid/kg GP and composed mainly of 3-hydroxytyrosol (1330 ± 22 mg/kg GP). In parallel, carbohydrate solubilization reached 245 g glucose/kg GP. These results demonstrate the promising potential of hydrothermally treated grape pomace as raw material for biorefinery processes.

Low concentrations of trace elements in many organic wastes recommend their supplementation in order to avoid potential limitations. Different chelating agents have been used to ensure an adequate trace metal pool in the soluble fraction, by forming dissolved complexes. Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) is probably the most common, although several negative effects could be associated with its usage. Biomethane potential tests were performed using Olive Mill Solid Waste as the substrate, supplementing different combinations of Fe, Co, Ni, Ba, always under the presence of EDTA. Results show that Ni and Co slightly recovered biodegradability. However, Ba supplementation resulted in worsening the methane yield coefficient in all cases. High concentration of EDTA led to decrease in the activity of anaerobic digestion. High availability of EDTA induces the capture of trace metals like Co or Ni, key trace metals for anaerobic biomass activity. While supplementing trace metals, the addition of Ba and/or EDTA must be carefully considered.

Biological synthesis of high added-value compounds like adipic acid (AA), levulinic acid (LA), or polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) using pure culture has been separately reported. However, pure culture requires sterile conditions and the use of specific carbon sources resulting in high operating costs. Different alternatives based on the use of mixed microbial cultures (MMC) have been explored to resolve this problem. MMC have been widely reported for the production of PHB, but scarcely reported for LA production and never for AA synthesis. This work presents a novel strategy for the co-production of AA LA, and PHB using MMC. The strategy consists in selecting an MMC producer of AA, LA and PHB from an inoculum obtained from a wastewater treatment plant, which is then subjected to the feast and famine culture strategy in a sequential batch reactor, coupled with a batch reactor step to enhance the accumulation of AA and LA. The results showed that the MMC could produce a 16 ± 2, 23 ± 1 and 5 ± %1 (g compound/g volatile solids) of AA, LA and PHB, respectively, using a non-fermented residual biomass rich in pentose, namely synthetic hemicellulose hydrolysate (SHH) as the carbon source. These results contribute to generating future research to better understand and optimise the biosynthesis of these compounds by MMC.

Obtaining sufficient and high-quality genomic DNA from sludge samples is a fundamental issue of feasibility and comparability in genomic studies of microbial diversity. Commercial kits for soil are often used for the extraction of gDNA from sludge samples due to the lack of specific kits. However, the evaluation of the performance of commercial kits for sludge DNA extraction is scarce and optimization of these methods to obtain a high quantity and quality of DNA is necessary, especially for downstream genomic sequencing. Sequential batch reactors (SBRs) loaded with lignocellulosic biomass are used for the synthesis of renewable resources such as levulinic acid (LA), adipic acid (AA), and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), and the biochemical synthesis of these compounds is conducted through the inoculation of microbes present in the residual activated sludge (AS) obtained from a municipal wastewater treatment plant. To characterize these microbes, the extraction of DNA from residual sewage sludge was conducted with three different commercial kits: Nucleospin^® Soil from Macherey-Nagel, DNEasy^® PowerSoil^® from Qiagen, and E.Z.N.A.^® Plant DNA Kit from Omega BIO-TEK. Nevertheless, to obtain the highest load and quality of DNA for next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis, different pretreatments and different combinations of these pretreatments were used. The pretreatments considered were an ultrasonic bath and a temperature of 80 °C, together and separately with different incubation time periods of 30, 60, and 90 min. The results obtained suggest a significant improvement in the efficiency and quality of DNA extraction with the three commercial extraction kits when used together with the ultrasonic bath and 80 °C for 60 min. Here, we were able to prove that physical pretreatments are a viable alternative to chemical lysis for DNA extraction from complex samples such as sludge.