Bacterial Communities in Various Conditions of the Composting Reactor Revealed by 16S rDNA Clone Analysis and DGGE - Sustainable Biotechnology: Sources of Renewable Energy - page 173

Fig. 1 Structure of bacterial community in small-scale reactors (reactor A , B ,and C ). Clones are
classified by order level
C as dominant order (38%) which using plastic bottle flakes as bulking agents
[15]. In general, the genus Bacillus is often detected from the reactor as the major
species in the composting process [5, 6, 10, 28], and there are only a few reports
in which the order Lactobacillales in the composting process is dominant [29, 30].
The dominance of the order Lactobacillales might be correlated with the type of
bulking agent, because the bulking agent strongly affects the oxygen concentration
or heat-retaining property in the reactor. There are three possible reasons for the
dominance of the order Lactobacillales . Firstly, plastic bottle flakes do not have a
water-absorbing property at the beginning of the run, therefore the moisture con-
tent of the reactor at the starting period was high and the inside of the reactor
might be microaerophilic condition. This might be because the order Lactobacillales
Fig. 2 Structure of bacterial community in the small-scale reactors (reactor A , B ,and C ). Clones
are classified by species level