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Bacterial population dynamics in recycled mushroom compost leachate

  • Environmental biotechnology
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Abstract

Mushrooms are an important food crop throughout the world. The most important edible mushroom is the button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), which comprises about 30% of the global mushroom market. This species is cultivated commercially on a selective compost that is produced predominantly from wheat straw/stable bedding and chicken manure, at a moisture content of around 70% (w/w) and temperatures of up to 80 °C. Large volumes of water are required to achieve this moisture content, and many producers therefore collect leachate from the composting windrows and bunkers (known in the industry as “goody water”) and reuse it to wet the raw ingredients. This has the benefit of recycling and saving water and has the potential to enrich beneficial microorganisms that stimulate composting, but also the risk of enhancing pathogen populations that could reduce productivity. Here, we show by 16S rRNA gene sequencing that mushroom compost leachate contains a high diversity of unknown microbes, with most of the species found affiliated with the phyla Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. However, by far the most abundant species was the thermophile Thermus thermophilus, which made up approximately 50% of the bacterial population present. Although the leachate was routinely collected and stored in an aerated central storage tank, many of the bacterial species found in leachate were facultative anaerobes. However, there was no evidence for sulfide production, and no sulfate-reducing bacterial species were detected. Because T. thermophilus is important in the high temperature phase of composting, the use of recycled leachate as an inoculum for the raw materials is likely to be beneficial for the composting process.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our industry partners, especially ELF Farm Supplies in Mulgrave, NSW, Australia, for their kind assistance with sampling and processing, and for their helpful advice on many aspects of mushroom composting.

Funding

This work was supported by grant MU10021 from Horticulture Innovation Australia.

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Correspondence to Michael A. Kertesz.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Safianowicz, K., Bell, T.L. & Kertesz, M.A. Bacterial population dynamics in recycled mushroom compost leachate. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 102, 5335–5342 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9007-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-018-9007-4

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