In Japan, around 25.31 million tons of food waste was generated in 2018 from consumer households, food manufacturing and retail [
36]. In addition to maximize social and economic benefits, such appropriate food waste management should be implemented to minimize the environmental impacts. Although recycling food waste as is preferred to compost and animal feed in Japan, composting of food waste still presents high-quality demanded by farmers, relatively low price, and a shortage of cropland for application [
37,
38,
39]. Therefore, since the most successful application at the commercial scale has so far been anaerobic digestion (AD), which has been widely adopted for waste treatment, a plentiful source of organic compounds such as pig manure (PM) can be used as feedstock in AD. Namely, since the fermented liquid feed (FLF) for pigs contains several nutrients required for bacterial growth, recycling food waste was considered a possible alternative for many years. Also, PM having a high buffering capacity possibly protects AD against failures due to the accumulation of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) [
40,
41,
42]. It was reported that the effect of varying PM with food waste mixing ratio was evaluated on methane yield, suggesting that the feedstock composition of 60:40 (volatile solid basis) significantly enhanced methane yield [
43]. On the other hand, the other group reported that using vegetable processing wastes as co-substrate with a feedstock ratio of 50:50 (dry weight basis) could improve methane yield up to 3-fold [
44]. Thus, since several potential co-substrates have been examined to assess the effect of varying feedstock composition on improving the AD process performance and increasing methane yield, the VFAs of the
C. cellulovorans medium containing PM were measured in this study. As a result, acetic acid (approx. 2300 mg/mL) and butyric acid (approx. 820 mg/mL) were accumulated for 14 days, respectively (
Figure 1). Since the high ammonia concentration might inhibit bacterial activity in AD [
45,
46,
47,
48,
49], PM was pretreated with 0.45 μm filtration before inoculation of
C. cellulovorans in this study to enhance methane production. By adjusting the carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio, co-digestion of PM with organic wastes including high carbon dilute seemed to improve the inhibitory effect on ammonia and to enhance the macro- and micro-nutrient balance in the feedstocks [
50,
51]. On the other hand, cow manure (CM) is rich in nutrients and can provide strong buffer capacity, and thus, CM seems more robust than other manures in AD [
52]. Therefore, the alleviation of ammonia inhibition when CM is used in AD seems not that urgent and should not be the priority of co-digestion. Additionally, CM is categorized as lignocellulosic waste due to its high amount of lignocellulose (50% in dry matter), which is relatively low in other types of manure [
53]. Hence, to make full use of CM to produce more methane via co-digestion, attention should be paid to how to improve the degradation of recalcitrant lignocellulose in CM. In addition, the current study determined biogas production in single-stage and two-stage AD using sheep manure (SP) as substrate and yak rumen fluid as the inoculum. Yak rumen fluid is rich in hydrolytic bacteria [
54] and, consequently, its inclusion should improve the degradation of lignocellosic biomass, leading to high biogas production.
All archaeal metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) could reveal the reconstruction of pathways related to methanogenesis and relevant energy conservation systems [
55]. Furthermore, the holistic microbial community activity could be evaluated by the average RPKM of genes in each KEGG module [
56]. Thus, by maintaining the methanogenic activity of the microbial community, such a syntrophic behavior is required to synthesize numerous metabolites. An overall shift of the microbial activity was observed in the majority of the KEGG modules after H
2 addition. Moreover, H
2 also enhanced the activity of the glyoxylate cycle and the biosynthesis of lipids and specific amino acids. In addition to H
2, formate such as a similarly formed product during fermentative metabolism, is an important electron carrier in the syntrophic fatty acid-degrading methanogenic consortia [
57]. In fact, formate was low concentration and immediately consumed in the PM medium (
Figure 1). Therefore, other anaerobes might utilize both formate and H
2 as an electron donor for methanogenesis or sulfate respiration.
Clostridium coculture systems are typically used to produce biofuels such as H
2 and CH
4, solvents, and organic acids [
58]. Because cellulosic materials are commonly found in nature [
18], the specific metabolic capacities of cellulolytic strains and producers in coculture systems have attracted significant attention and offered many long-term prospects for development. Furthermore, since the combination of genome-centric metagenomics and metatranscriptomics successfully revealed individual functional roles of microbial members in methanogenic microcosms, these results assigned a multi-trophic role to
Methanosarcina ssp., suggesting its ability to perform simultaneous methanogenesis from acetate, CO
2 and methanol/methylamine [
55]. MFMP used in this study originally consisted of
C. butyricum (0.005%) identified as the same genus of
C. celulovorans and
M. mazei (1.34%) found among methanogens [
32]. Furthermore, other methanogens such as
Methanosaetaceae,
Methanosaeta, and
Methanospirillaceae were also identified in MFMP. The genus
Methanosaeta, which utilizes only acetate, was a large portion of ratio next to
Methanosarcina. On the other hand, 1% acetate or 1% methanol was used as the sole carbon source for MFMP cultivation in this study. As a result, while
Methanosarcina siciliae (1.178%),
M. barkeri (0.571%), and
Methanofollis (0.490%) were major species in the 1% methanol medium for 72 h cultivation,
Methanofollis (0.211%) was dominant in the 1% acetate medium for 72 h cultivation (Table 2). It is thought that all methanogens are physiologically specialized and able to scavenge the electrons from H
2, formate, acetate, and methanol, having CH
4 as the final product [
49]. The
Clostridium coculture system can also produce CH
4 in addition to producing H
2 and solvents, in particular the coculture of cellulolytic Clostridia and methanogens including
M. barkeri Fusaro,
M. mazei, and
Methanothermobacter thermautotrophicus, the methanogens utilized H
2 and CO
2, acetate, and even formate that was generated by the cellulolytic Clostridia from cellulose to produce CH
4 [
33,
59]. In this study, CH
4 production by cellobiose was not found in the cocultivation of
C. cellulovorans-
M. mazei (
C.c:
M.m = 1:3), while only acetate led to methanogenesis in the cocultivation of
C. cellulovorans-MFMP (
Figure 2). In addition, since
M. barkeri was more dominant than
M. mazei in MFMP cultivation according to the 16S rRNA analysis (Table 2), it seemed that
Methanosarcina spp. may play a key role on the methanogenesis of MFMP. So far, it has been reported that CH
4 production was investigated with sugar beet pulp [
16] and mandarin orange peel [
17] in the cocultivation of
C. cellulovorans-MFMP (
C.c:MFMP = 1:20). Therefore, carbon sources such as acetic acid and methanol were compared by the production of CH
4 in this study. As expected, CH
4 production from methanol was approximately eight times higher than that from acetic acid, with related to the cell growth of MFMP (
Figure 3). Thus, methanogens seemed to be altered in their flora dependent on the sole carbon source.