The environment is polluted, nearly everywhere. While world leaders keep announcing solutions, especially after the Paris Agreement, without starting any process for implementation, the Microbiologist David Emerson is seeing how environment can clean itself.
This is quite weird, but scientists are studying how bacteria can metabolize oil spilled into the sea, or plants that take up toxic compounds, especially that such amazing life forms are everywhere.
Emerson has located one amazing life form in a ditch, filled with bright orange rusty water, near Boothbay, Maine. The ditch is teeming with a sort of iron-oxidizing bacteria; an organism called Leptothrix ochracea.
Emerson, who has been collecting bacteria from the ditch in the springtime and, feeding it steel dust and making sure it gets just enough oxygen, said: “These organisms are pretty heavily involved in fouling and corrosion of water pipelines,” adding “Entire systems have gotten clogged with iron bacteria.”
He’s trying to figure out how the bacteria feeds on iron, and what these bacteria have in common with each other.
The microbiologist hopes that we will be able to figure out how to harness these bacteria to improve our world, by filtering water, building mini-structures out of rust, and catalyzing reactions.
“What makes them special for me is that when you look at them under the microscope, they make these amazing structures of either tubes or twisted stalks,” says microbiologist Emily Fleming.
Fleming and Emerson have recently figured out how to grow some of these bacteria species in a lab.
Leptothrix ochracea is a bacterium, that occurs in iron-rich fresh water and wetlands with only low concentrations of organic matter. If this type of bacteria gets into a water system, it can turn your tap water bright orange.
Once the bacteria feed on the iron, it turns to rust, and that rust can grab onto stuff floating by, like arsenic, other harmful metals, even viruses.
In conclusion, what matters to us is that these bacteria can help filter water, knowing that that rust is remarkably delicate.
