The effect of the feed-associated
microbes was visible with microbially impoverished vermicompost,
but not with fresh vermicompost, and this could have been
due to concentration effects, i.e. there was a greater mass of vermicompost
than food. In an earlier experiment, Hénault-Ethier et al.
(2015) studied the bacterial diversity of continuous vermicomposting
using the same substrates and operating conditions (in
fact, the resulting vermicompost from the previous experiment
was used in the current experiment). The bacteria were here further
classified as potential human pathogens (Table 2) and antagonists
(Table 3) by checking against the public databases of the
German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (http://
www.dsmz.de) to determine their risk group and surveying the
bacteria names and the term antagonism on Web of Science to document
potential antagonisms.