GoKawiilEnvironmental engineer Ludmilla Aristilde (right) and her colleagues work on developing biotechnology-led solutions to combat pollution.Credit: Benjamin Barrios-Cerda/Aristilde lab
Ludmilla Aristilde has always been aware of how closely tied well-being is to the world around us. Raised in Haiti, she and her family survived two cholera outbreaks stemming from contaminated water. “These were my earliest experiences of realizing that environmental pollution and human health are linked,” she says. “I was really young at the time, but I understood this was a serious thing.”
At 12 years old, she learnt that some environmental damage could be undone. On a school trip to the deforested mountains above Port-au-Prince, Aristilde and her classmates were taught about the impacts of erosion, and they helped to plant around 1,000 saplings in the bare earth overlooking the capital. “It showed us we can do something to reverse the environmental consequences of our actions,” Aristilde says.
Nature Spotlight: Synthetic biology
Now an environmental engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Aristilde has dedicated her career to working out ways to mitigate environmental harm. She is part of a growing community of synthetic biologists using biotechnology-led solutions to tackle pollution ranging from microplastics and industrial waste to soils laced with heavy metals or explosive residues.
Scientists are doing this mainly with the help of microorganisms containing DNA that the researchers have tailored for a specific function. These engineered microbes not only offer hope for cleaning up the environment, but can also be used in circular industries — ones in which materials are kept in use for as long as possible instead of being discarded — to repurpose pollutants or recover resources from waste streams.
“Things are now feasible that were considered impossible a decade ago,” says Michael Köpke, a synthetic biologist and chief innovation officer at LanzaTech, a company headquartered in Skokie, Illinois, that transforms industrial waste and emissions into useful materials. “These technologies can help us as a society move towards a circular model, in which we use as much waste as possible for production of fuels, chemicals and materials.”
Although synthetic biology offers a potential solution for tackling some of the many pollutants that plague the planet, researchers say that the field is being held back from reaching its true potential by concerns around releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment, and a lack of government funding and incentives. Should these challenges be overcome, however, many specialists think that modified microbes could be key partners for helping humanity to clean up some of the mess it has made of Earth’s water, air and soil.
Microbes in the making
The idea of tinkering with microbes to address environmental problems is not new, says Víctor de Lorenzo, a molecular environmental microbiologist at the National Biotechnology Centre in Madrid. “In the late 1980s, there was this big hype about using engineered bacteria to address pollution, oil spills, you name it.”
... continue reading