Microbial structure and function diversity of open dumpsite compost used as fertilizer by peasant farmers

A study was carried out to assess the microbial communities and functions in addition to several key environmental variables (pH, temperature, carbon, nitrogen, carbon to nitrogen ratio, and moisture) of open dumpsite compost. Sampling was done on days 45 and 90 following composting of the organic fraction of the municipal solid waste (MSW). Following community DNA extraction, sequencing was done on Illumina Miseq platform. Pair-ends of the sequences reads were assembled using the make-contigs tool while open reading frame (OBEs) was done using FragGeneScan and these were functionally annotated to several bioinformatics pipelines. Structural composition revealed 5 kingdoms namely bacteria, protozoa, unknown, archaea, and fungi but with varying degree of abundance. After unknown phyla, proteobacteria was the second dominant phyla with abundance of 42.45 and 40.30% , respectively on days 45 and 90 and they were well represented in the class, order and family taxas in both samples. Majority of the genus in both samples were uncultured genus. However, potential pathogenic species belonging to the genuses Clostridium, Escherichia, Pseudomonas, Enterococcus, Micrococcus, Shigella, Klebsiella and Bacillus amongst other were detected in our samples on 90days. Physiological diversity assessment revealed that carbohydrate (CHO) metabolisms were the most dominant and was almost similar in both samples. At day 45, the CHO metabolisms were dominated by phylotypes belonging to the alphaproteobacteria and betaproteobacteria classes of bacteria but it was more diverse on day 90 as Chlorobi, Gammaproteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Tenericutes, and Planctomycetes were also involved. Other metabolisms such as amino acid, nucleotides, vitamins and co-factors, xenobiotics, genetic information and well as environmental information processing were also captured. This practice should be discouraged to avoid incidence of food-borne diseases. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of African Institute of Mathematical Sciences / Next Einstein Initiative.