Energy Bioengineering Group Project Overview

Recently, our team compared microbial mats from Canadian soda lakes, on the Cariboo Plateau, BC, to Asian soda lakes on the Kulunda steppe, Mongolia. Metagenomics analyses showed that these distant ecosystems share a common ecological blueprint, a similar microbial community. Apparently, nature has come up with a single solution for this ecosystem – a community structure that is both productive and robust in an extreme and dynamic environment. Our aim is to use the common ecological blueprint to realize a technically and economically feasible bio-process, powered by the sun, for direct-air-capture and conversion of CO2 into bio-energy.

This project is about geospatial variability in Alberta groundwater and focuses on contaminants that impact human, livestock and ecosystem health. The objective is to determine the occurrence, origin and turnover of contaminants in the context of the structured subsurface environment. Selected contaminants with potential microbial turnover are methane, ethane, propane, nitrate, manganese, iron, sulfate and sulfide, selenium and fluoride. The approach consists of combining geochemical and metagenomics/proteomics analyses for 180 to 270 samples from Groundwater Observation Well Network monitoring wells throughout Alberta. This is leading to a rich dataset, unique worldwide in scale and scope.

This research addresses complex microbial communities, nowadays often referred to as “microbiomes”. Such communities can for example be human microbiomes, rumen microbiomes, groundwater microbiomes, or the microbiome of an oil sands tailings pond. Microbiomes perform key processes in all these ecosystems. Well-tuned microbiomes are key to desired outcomes such as successful bioremediation or improved human and animal health. Microbiomes consist of hundreds of different microbial species, which interact in unknown ways. This leads to a vast complexity and a need for big data approaches to realize successful outcomes.