Research Information System
Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, vol.14, no.1, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Non-axenic biogranules are suggested as cost-effective self-healing agents for microbial self-healing concrete, enabling crack sealing via microbially induced calcium carbonate precipitation. Ensuring consistent biogranule quality is crucial for reliable performance and market adoption. Traditional methods for community control of non-axenic cultures such as molecular and culture-based techniques are resource-intensive, and lacking rapid, cost-effective, high-throughput monitoring. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a rapid, cost-effective, and robust quality assessment tool. This study evaluates flow cytometry (FC) as a rapid quality control and standardization tool for non-axenic biogranules. A sonication-based pre-treatment was developed and validated to enable FC analysis of the granular biomass. We analyzed multiple biogranule harvests for viability, community structure, activity, resilience, and granule quality. FC fingerprints strongly correlated with phylogenetic data, microbial activity, and microscopic observations. Fingerprints consistently converged after 72-hour resuscitation confirming a stable functional microbial community across batches produced over a 7 months period. Moreover, evolution of FC fingerprints allowed for the prediction of 72-hour microbial activities and the precise identification of good/sub-optimal quality batches under application-relevant saline/alkaline stress. These added benefits make FC fingerprinting superior for quality control compared to conventional molecular techniques. Our findings confirm that FC fingerprinting provides a rapid, reliable and high-throughput method for quality control, directly addressing reliability, efficiency and standardization challenges for non-axenic microbial self-healing agents.