Team:Toronto/Biozone Interviews

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Interviews

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Our team interviewed a total of 26 graduate students from Biozone, a center within our host Chemical Engineering Department, which finds new innovative ways to apply biotechnology to address urgent societal needs in environment, energy and health. Most projects revolved around the cleaning or bioremediation of water in some specific respect. Our interviewees were working on various projects from using proteins for enhancing bio-sludge dewaterability to applying biofilms in the recovery of rare earth metals. After conducting these interviews, we were able to establish the relevance of our project.

Targeting environmental issues seemed very important to our team, as it was a recurring topic for our project ideas. We decided to link our potential project ideas with biozone graduate students to ensure our idea was relevant, worth pursuing and beneficial to the world.

Interviews conducted:

Mahbod Hajighasemi’s work revolved around enzymatic degradation of bioplastics. Bioplastics from renewable sources are green alternatives to current petroleum-based plastics. During this interviews, Mahbod was asked what problems he is addressing and what problems he encountered during his work. After learning about the problem of removing microplastics from tap water, we were curious to learn about the process of filtering or removing microplastics out of water and its plausibility.

Olivia Molenda’s work focused on the anaerobic treatment of soil and groundwater contaminants. Chlorinated ethenes/ethanes are toxic and recalcitrant groundwater and soil contaminants.

Nadia Morson’s research involves the treatment of contaminated groundwater by anaerobic reductive dechlorination. Dechlorinating microbes, such as Dehalococcoides mccartyi, are able to degrade highly chlorinated (toxic) compounds, such as perchloroethylene and trichloroethylene, into ethene, a non-toxic end-product.

Scott Proulx’s work revolves around metabolic engineering and adipic acid, which is a precursor for nylon production. Microbial organisms, such as E. coli can be used biocatalysts to produce chemicals as a solution that would be sustainable feedstocks such as glucose and may be operated at moderate reaction conditions with minimal toxic by-products.

Naveen Venayak works on the applied laboratory automation and synthetic biology to engineer dynamically controlled microorganisms and focuses on developing synthetic circuits to dynamically control microbes throughout the duration of a fermentation process, allowing finer control and significantly improved performance.

Mitchell Zak focuses on applying algal biofilms for the recovery of rare earth metals. We learned from Mitchell that algae possesses a variety of potential applications, ranging from biofuel production to wastewater treatment.

[https://www.biozone.utoronto.ca/students/]

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