with milled wheat straw (WS) as reference substrate. The generally used cow manure as co-
substrate was replaced with a buffering salt solution having trace elements called 'synthetic
manure'. The inoculum sludge was artificially flocculated and thickened to accelerate the
BMP assay and to favour microbial syntrophy. The chemical stoichiometric formula for WS
was estimated to be C 3.71 H 6.04 O 2.79 N 0.044 S 0.005 and this was used to calculate …