4.
Molecular microbial ecology tools to monitor the functioning
of
bioreactors
Since a dozen years, the advances of molecular biology tools applied to
microbial ecology have made us move away from the ‘black box’
approach when using microbial consortia for biotechnological purposes. Novel molecular approaches have become available to
characterise the community structures, their catalogue of genes and the functions
and interactions of the different actors involved in the
production of hydrogen (Spiegelman et al, 2005; Collins et
al., 2006; Rittmann, 2006). We propose to develop and compare different
approaches of molecular microbial ecology applied to novel
bioreactors for hydrogen production. This will constitute the basis for a competence centre in molecular microbial ecology in the University of
Liège, and serve as a focus point for all laboratories interested by the use of
these methods.
