ACID MINE DRAINAGE:
DOE RELEVANCE:
- AMD is a major international environmental problem associated with energy and metal resources.
- AMD microbiology can be harnessed for energy-efficient metal recovery and removal of sulfur and mercury from coal
BIOLOGY AND AMD FORMATION
- Microorganisms gain energy from iron and sulfur oxidation,
- Byproducts of microbial metabolism promote AMD formation
PRIOR WORK
- Reports (2004- )
PROJECT GOAL:
To understand, at the molecular level, how microbial communities function in their natural habitats and respond to environmental perturbation
This requires analysis of the factors that control community assembly at the species and strain level, the ways in which metabolic roles are partitioned, and how resources such as carbon, nitrogen, and energy are allocated into metabolic pathways.
APPROACH:
- develop in situ approaches for the study of consortia of uncultivated microorganisms.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES:
- proteogenomic analyses are currently restricted because peptides that differ from those predicted from gene sequences can be measured, but they generally cannot be identified by database matching, even if the difference is only one amino acid residue.
- many of the identified proteins have no known function.
STUDY SYSTEM:
- low diversity biofilms that underpin acid mine drainage (AMD) formation within the Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, California.
- biofilm communities that carry out all roles (carbon and nitrogen fixation, energy generation).
PROJECT COMPONENTS:
1) Genomics and ecological dynamics of microbial communities
2) Proteomics of natural communities
3) Biochemistry: functional analysis of novel proteins
PROJECT DATABASES
- genomics
-proteomics