SEAWEED AD · Anaerobic Digestion of Seaweed for Biofuels

The overall aims of this 24 month project are to apply metagenomic methods and develop fermentation technologies to select and study an optimum microbial inoculum and define seaweed processing conditions (including detoxification) for the production of methane biofuel from the anaerobic digestion (AD) of seaweeds. In addition the fractionation and characterisation of seaweed antimicrobials and other potential biopharmaceuticals released by bacterial enzymic hydrolysis will be assessed with a consideration as to their add-on value in AD of seaweed.