Department Environmental Chemistry

Biotransformation prediction typically suffers from low accuracy and sensitivity. This is at least partly due to the fact that the variable capacity of microbial communities towards contaminant biotransformation is not directly considered. Our ability to include microbial community information into biotransformation prediction, and thus make it more environment-specific, hinges on our understanding of what enzymes catalyze what types of biotransformation in natural microbial communities. 

We want to address this challenge by testing the hypothesis that community transcription profiling of microbial communities can be used to establish new and refine existing linkages between gene products (i.e., enzymes) and biotransformation reactions. We will do this by simultaneous characterization of communities in terms of their biotransformation capacity and their transcription profile using metatranscriptome sequencing. The communities will be either sourced from full-scale wastewater treatment plants or manipulated, e.g., to represent different sludge ages.