14 DAY TRIAL // Professor Willy Verstraete is the head of the Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Technology (LabMET - Faculty of Bioscience Engineering) at Ghent University, Belgium and he held a lecture yesterday, about the way that environmental problems can be solved thanks to molecular and biotechnological techniques.
Until recently, most people focused on everything big: a big house, a big car, a big bank account, and also big power plants, big industries etc.
During the last few years, scientists discovered that the technology allows doing big things with small particles, like biomass, nanoparticles and microbes, and as the world's population grows, so does the global temperature, and all the problems related to it.
One of these issues is, for example, last year's swine flu pandemic, or Influenza A H1N1, that killed thousands of people worldwide.
Prof. Verstraete and his team have developed nanosilver particles from silver ions, thanks to the Lactobacillus bacteria (a 'good' bacteria), that can kill the infectious norovirus and could be used as potential therapy against other viruses, like influenza.
Another global problem is clean energy, and more and more countries become aware of it.
It has become necessary to pass onto clean, green energy not only because fossil fuels will no longer be sufficient for everybody, but also because of the climate change caused by fossil fuel pollution.
So, the solution to getting new energy from renewable sources is biomass, and Professor Verstraete explained how his team developed a new anaerobic reactor, that can give as much electricity as 25 wind turbines.
This type of reactor uses a combination of methane-producing bacteria that degrades waste and energy crops and produces biogas.
The biogas, which is a mixture of carbon and methane, is then converted to electricity by a turbine.
Another global problem is the access to clean drinking water for everybody, and the latest purification method uses microbes; actually, microbes have been used for a while now, for bioremediation and decontamination.
Professor Verstraete and his team, thanks to funding by the EU's "LIFE" project, have isolated a bacterium that can be injected into ground water sites and decontaminate them from chlorinated waste.
The bacterium is called Desulphitobacterium dichloroeleminans and it purifies the water by removing chlorinated alkanes, which are the most common contaminants of soil and groundwater.
The Professor said that in order “to fully understand how microbes play a part in solving our environmental problems, we must better explore our microbial resources as they currently exist - in culture collections or at 'evolved' environmental sites.
“We need to develop key strategies to deal with microbial communities, instead of thinking of them in terms of haphazard assemblages of bacterial species.
“By 'upgrading' the services of microbial communities through implementing Microbial Resource Management (MRM) and combining these communities with new technology, these environmental challenges can be addressed,” he added.
Professor Willy Verstraete presented yesterday (October 10, 2010), the third Environmental Microbiology Lecture: "Microbial Resource Management (MRM): the way forward for environmental biotechnology", including solutions that are most appropriate for today's market economy.