Diversity of dead bacterial biomass consumers in compost

The dead bacterial biomass seems a conventional substrate in compost, but there is scarce direct evidence of the metabolic activity of the biomass consumers in the complex compost ecosystems. In this study, we determined the regrowth potential of Escherichia coli in the presence of dead bacterial biomass in compost and identified the biomass metabolizers that grew competitively with E. coli by using high-sensitivity stable isotope probing of rRNA.