Bacterial cultures are sometimes added to groundwater to increase the rate of degradation of contaminants. Three cultures that are able to completely biodegrade their primary compound to non-toxic end products in the absence of oxygen have been enriched from contaminated soils. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the efficacy of these cultures in a controlled field experiment. High resolution temporal and spatial data will be collected to estimate degradation rates, and support a process level understanding.

The overall objective of this project is to scale up and demonstrate the utility of novel bioaugmentation cultures for BTEX compounds, and associated diagnostic tools to properly deploy the technology. The intern will lead the project team to develop gene-based biomarker tools applicable to the bioaugmentation cultures and apply these tools to samples submitted from bench scale treatability testing and real world field samples.

The project is focused on study of commercial microbial cultures for biological remediation of soils and ground waters contaminated by chlorinated organic. The successful elaboration and improvement of the products requires analysis on molecular-genetic level and developing of specific techniques (16S pyrotag pipeline) for microbial communities profiling and metabolic reconstruction. The work benefits to industry partner by providing comprehensive information on functional and taxonomic structure of the studied microbial communities.