Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste and Its Microbial Consortia: A Historical Review and Future Perspectives

Renewable energy source, such as food waste (FW), has drawn great attention globally due to the energy crisis and the environmental problem. Anaerobic digestion (AD) mediated by novel microbial consortia is widely used to convert FW to clean energy. Despite of the considerable progress on food waste and FWAD optimization condition in recent years, a comprehensive and predictive understanding of FWAD microbial consortia is absent and therefore represents a major research challenge in FWAD. The review begins with a global view on the FWAD status and is followed by an overview of the role of AD key conditions’ association with microbial community variation during the three main energy substances (hydrogen, organic acids, and methane) production by FWAD. The following topic is the historical understanding of the FWAD microorganism through the development of molecular biotechnology, from classic strain isolation to low-throughput sequencing technologies, to high-throughput sequencing technologies, and to the combination of high-throughput sequencing and isotope tracing. Finally, the integration of multi-omics for better understanding of the microbial community activity and the synthetic biology for the manipulation of the functioning microbial consortia during the FWAD process are proposed. Understanding microbial consortia in FWAD helps us to better manage the global renewable energy source.