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BIOREMEDIATION
One quest of bioremediation researchers has been to find bacteria that completely dechlorinate chloroethenes, among the most common industrial pollutants in soils and groundwater. Although scientists knew from soil samples that such bacteria must exist, known strains either have been incapable of removing the last chlorine or did so inefficiently. Now, meet BAV1, a strain of Dehalococcoides that uses vinyl chloride directly as a metabolic electron acceptor, producing ethene and inorganic chloride [Nature, 424, 62 (2003)]. Isolated from a sample collected from a chloroethene-contaminated aquifer in Oscoda, Mich., the bacterium was characterized by a research team led by microbiologist Frank E. Löffler, an assistant professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.
But it's the degradation of vinyl chloride that holds the interest of the bioremediation community. "People are already out there marketing mixed-culture glop" to dechlorinate sites, says James M. Gossett, director of the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. Indeed, Löffler has worked with Regenesis Bioremediation Products in San Clemente, Calif., to develop Bio-Dechlor Inoculum, which contains several Dehalococcoides species, including BAV1. Studying BAV1 by itself, however, may lead to a deeper understanding of bioremediation processes. "We can now find and study the enzyme responsible for that last dechlorination step and figure out what makes this organism so special," Gossett says. |
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