Biodegradation, Bioremediation and Biotransformation by Genetically Engineered Microbes

Microorganisms play an important role in sustaining life on earth. They have the capacity to eat up the waste we humans make, clean up the environment, mop up oils spills, make energy, eat concrete and curb up some of the global warming problems. Bacteria can be used to protect the environment by helping us to move away from using hydrocarbons as fuel. Bacteria have the capacity to adapt quickly to new environments. In the lab, we can make them resistant to antibiotics as well as resistant to metals. We can mutate them or grow to superbug proportions. Out of these total microbial communities, only 0.1% to 1.0% microorganisms can be cultured.
In order to promote sustainable development of community with low environmental impact, there is a pressing need of eliminating wide range of pollutants and wastes from the environment.  This is an essential step for the improvement of total health of people.

Research and Discovery

Advanced Genomics with the help of partners is using state- of- the- art technologies and bioinformatics tools for biodegradation, bioremediation, biotransformation to explore the field of metagenomics. Followings are the few steps:

• Generate genomic sequence data directly from natural environments, bypassing lab cultivation step. We are using technologies like next generation sequencing that avoids the use of cloning step.
• Understand microbial ecology and metabolic pathways of Archaea. It harbors an excellent repertoire of novel genes that have tremendous potential in the development of novel biocatalysts for industrial and medical applications.
• Understand the changes in the human microbiome that can be correlated with human health.
• Remediate toxic waste sites or understand how microbes contribute to carbon sequestration and global warming.
• Identify microbial population that combine, and effectively degrade xenobiotic compounds
• Fix the cellular defects that causes disease
• Unravel the genes secrets to deal with major symptoms of the disease.

Complete Solutions

Advanced Genomics focuses on 16S ribosomal RNA sequences which are short and conserved within species and are different among species.

• Construct bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) libraries to recover longer sequences more than few thousand base pairs from environmental samples
• Sequence these libraries to enable environmental monitoring
• Construction of metagenomic libraries
• Sequence and analysis of cloned DNA
• Search for novel genes and gene products