Environmental biotechnology, FHNW School of Life Sciences

With the support of microorganisms, contaminated sites can be remediated in a resource-saving manner.

Careless or inappropriate handling of chemicals has contaminated a variety of sites in the past. In order to avert possible dangers for the environment a renovation is necessary, and to make these areas usable again for future generations.

As an alternative to conventional remediation procedures, biological processes are of interest for two reasons. On the one hand, biological remediation procedures are often gentler and require less drastic intervention at the site. On the other hand, these methods can also be preferred for reasons of cost.

Waste from agriculture and industry can be converted by (bio-) technological processes into high-quality raw materials for chemical processes.

The processing of agricultural and industrial products generates considerable amounts of waste. However, there is still considerable material and energetic potential in these wastes, which must first be tapped through suitable processes. For example, from waste from agriculture or food production with biotechnology-based applications, basic building blocks for the synthesis of new products can be transformed. Furthermore, treated by means of microorganisms wastewater of the metal processing and at the same time rare earths and valuable metals are recovered.

The knowledge of the fate of pollutants forms the basis for assessing negative environmental impacts and developing solutions for them.

One focus of our research group is on the environmental fate of various pollutants (e.g., antibiotics, flame retardants, heavy metals, nanoplastics). On the one hand, we investigate the degradation and the transformation by natural societies of bacteria and fungi; On the other hand, we use these microbial communities in a targeted manner to make harmful substances more harmless. We use state-of-the-art techniques such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) or flow cytometry.

Next Generation Sequencing as a method for identifying pollutant-degrading bacteria and their communities at the DNA and RNA level.

The development of Next Generation Sequencing has provided us with powerful methods for identifying pollutant-degrading bacteria and their communities at the DNA and RNA level. Furthermore, we are able to decipher complex microbial degradation pathways of pollutants through sequencing. We sequence directly on site and use bioinformatic pipelines and statistical evaluations to generate targeted and well-founded statements about environmental microbiomes.