Industrial practises of the past and present have led to the contamination of a wide range of environments with toxic and recalcitrant compounds the world over. Amongst the variety of technologies that have been developed to decontaminate or “clean-up” our environment, biological remediation is at once the youngest and most promising. Biological remediation or “bioremediation” harnesses the insatiable appetite and metabolic versatility of the microbial world to breakdown the natural or human made compounds that pollute our natural and built environments.

In this project we exploit our knowledge of contemporary microbial ecology to facilitate the biological degradation of chlorinated hydrocarbons in soil and water environments. We aim to develop novel technologies for use in the global bioremediation market, to generate a better understanding of how microbial communities clean up the environment and to produce new methods for monitoring changes in the composition and function of microbial communities.

The research programme integrates traditional microbiological techniques with modern molecular techniques and analytical chemistry to achieve desirable outcomes for our industrial partner (Orica Australia Pty Ltd), local community groups and state and federal government regulators. In its two-year history, built from the ground up, the project has conducted countless laboratory tests, generated novel approaches to bioremediation, conducted field trials, filed a patent and generated publications and poster and platform presentations within Australia and Internationally.

In particular, the successful delivery of novel bioremediation technologies is based on, (i), the introduction of modern molecular community analysis, (ii), the incorporation of contemporary understanding of bacterial consortia and biofilm biology, (iii), a solid capacity building in analytical chemistry and (iv), the application of novel methods for facilitating effective electron transfer between toxic compounds and members of the bacterial degradation community.