Designing Microbial Consortia for Conversion of Wet Waste to Commodity Chemicals
Abstract
The US Army deploys thousands of soldiers to diverse locations each year, leading to the generation of a tremendous amount of wet waste, primarily in the form of food, paper, and organic scraps on base. These irregular waste streams (due to unpredictable soldier deployment) lead to equally unpredictable compositions of associated waste streams. Though anaerobic digestors can be used to capture some of this waste and convert it to useful products (e.g. methane-rich biogas for fuel), the microbes within such digestors are largely undefined and suffer from a lengthy amount of lag time before any product is detectable. This project seeks to reduce this lag time, largely by seeding anaerobic digestors with a stable " core of naturally occurring microbes (microbial consortia) that could be deployed to convert organic waste into commodity chemicals. These microbes could also be engineered to convert any excess metabolic end product from anaerobic digestion to a chemical of interest directly on Army sites. To accomplish this goal, we will ( 1) enrich & isolate biomass-degrading microbes from natural environments (herbivore guts & ocean sediments), (2) construct new metabolic models to understand & direct microbial partnership, and (3) develop new culture strategies to promote consortia stability against environmental peturbations. This plan will also engage graduate student trainees with researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory, who will partner with us to test the scalability & tolerance of microbial consortia against waste materials. In this way, we will increase trainee exposure to DoD-relevant research, and expand their DoD professional network. This project will be carried out on the UC-Santa Barbara campus, which is an ideal place to strengthen the career development of underrepresented minority (URM) students, UCSB is a the first Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in the selective Association of American Universities. Funding support from this effort will directly support 2 PhD students - one each from the O Malley & Valentine labs - along with 2 undergraduate researchers drawn from a pool of URM students. Undergraduate students will be recruited as part of the existing minority-strengthening Early Undergraduate Research Experience and Knowledge Acquisition (EUREKA) program, where they will also benefit from enrollment in a "Practice of Science" course to gain research skills prior to joining the PIs laboratory. The EUREKA program is coordinated by the Center for Science & Engineering Partnership (CSEP), which has an excellent track record in training URM students to bolster their prospects for graduate education & industrial employment. Graduate URM students will be research mentors to these students, and will train the students to present their research at the Annual Summer Poster Colloquium. Both undergraduate & graduate students will participate in the year-long CSEP professional development series - this will expand the impact of the funded project to other CSEP participants, which are over 50% URM. Valuable skills in technical writing & presentation will be taught in the series, along with seminars on how to apply to graduate school/industry, the benefits of work-life-balance, and career testimonials from professors and local professionals in STEM. Finally, URM trainees will have the opportunity to travel to conferences to expand their network, including the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Latinos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) annual meeting...
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 22, 2018
- Source ID
- W911NF1910010
Entities
People
- Michelle O Malley
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- University of California, Santa Barbara