Recent research has demonstrated that synthetic
methanotroph-photoautotroph cocultures offer a highly promising route to
convert biogas into value-added products. However, there is a lack of
techniques for fast and accurate characterization of cocultures, such as
determining the individual biomass concentration of each organism in
real-time. To address this unsolved challenge, we propose an
experimental-computational protocol for fast, easy and accurate
quantitative characterization of the methanotroph-photoautotroph
cocultures. Besides determining the individual biomass concentration of
each organism in the coculture, the protocol can also obtain the
individual consumption and production rates of O2 and CO2 for the
methanotroph and photoautotroph, respectively. The accuracy and
effectiveness of the proposed protocol was demonstrated using two model
coculture pairs, Methylomicrobium alcaliphilum 20ZR - Synechococcus sp.
PCC7002 that prefers high pH high salt condition, and Methylococcus
capsulatus - Chlorella sorokiniana that prefers low salt and neutral pH
medium. The performance of the proposed protocol was compared with a
flow cytometry based cell counting approach. The experimental results
show that the proposed protocol is much easier to carry out and delivers
faster and more accurate results in measuring individual biomass
concentration than the cell counting approach without requiring any
special equipment.