“…The various techniques that have been studied for inoculum pre-treatment include physical technologies such as thermal treatment or heat shock treatment (HST) (Song et al, 2012a;Cai et al, 2009;Liu et al, 2009;O-Thong et al, 2009;Ren et al, 2008;Zhu and B eland, 2006), freezing and thawing (Rossi et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2009), microwave irradiation (Singhal and Singh, 2014;Song et al, 2012b), ultrasound irradiation Wang et al, 2010), electric current (Jeong et al, 2013;Roychowdhury and Mcalister, 2000), aeration (Song et al, 2012a;Ren et al, 2008;Zhu and B eland, 2006;Wang et al, 2012), ultraviolet Wang et al, 2010Wang et al, , 2012, infrared (Song et al, 2012a) and gamma irradiation (Yin et al, 2014) and chemical treatment involving the use of acid or alkali Liu et al, 2009;Cai et al, 2009;O-Thong et al, 2009;Ren et al, 2008;Zhu and B eland, 2006), load-shock treatment (LST) (Luo et al, 2011(Luo et al, , 2010O-Thong et al, 2009) and methanogen inhibitors such as 2-bromoethanesulfonate (BES) or 2-bromoethanesulfonic acid (BESA) (O-Thong et al, 2009;Zhu and B eland, 2006), chloroform (Luo et al, 2010;Argun and Kargi, 2009), iodopropane (Zhu and B eland, 2006), acetylene (ValdezVazquez et al, 2006), linoleic acid (LA) Chaganti et al, 2012;…”