ClearWater: Clearing coloured waters by community breeding

Sustaining the water needs of a growing human population under climate change is one of the most fundamental challenges in the 21st century. Research has focused on how to clear coloured waters, often caused by harsh weather events and increasing temperatures. Nevertheless, this process is technically challenging and costly. Bacterial organisms naturally offer a solution to this problem as they recycle these materials and re-introduce them into nutrient cycles by turning the dissolved organic carbon material into biomass.

This project aims to “breed” bacterial communities to increase their ability to clear coloured waters. To understand how environmental change may modify this process, the project will carry out experiments under different temperature and nutrient treatments similar to conditions predicted for global change. All bacterial communities will be characterized by meta-genomic-sequencing and bacterial resource usage will be explored using Orbitrap-mass-spectrometry. This will provide data guiding future researchers on how to breed microbial communities for obtaining, but also improving, specific functions.