Cleaning Up the Environment

Newly discovered microorganisms may soon be used to clean up chemical wastes with high salt contents in the environment. UBRPer Susheela Carroll is doing research on how these microorganisms are able to break down harmful organic chemicals formed by industrial processes.

Some industrial processes, such as oil and gas recovery, produce wastes that contain organic chemicals and a lot of salt. Newly discovered microbes, classified as halophilic archaea, can survive in the salty conditions ten times that of seawater while being used to degrade polluting organic chemicals into compounds that are less harmful to the environment. Susheela is researching how exactly the microorganisms do this by studying their genes and the enzymes they make.

“ In the future, we might be able to isolate enzymes that can be used to biodegrade polluting chemicals under high salt conditions from these microorganisms,” says Dr. Gejiao Wang, a research associate.

The project is supported by the National Science Foundation. Susheela will spend the summer of 2004 in Northern Ireland on the BRAVO! Program working with Dr. Mike Larkin studying halophilic amidase, which is a topic of interest to both the Larkin and the Rensing labs.

Susheela Carroll, UBRPer in Dr. Christopher Rensing’s lab, Soil, Water and Environmental Science

Name that Mosquito!

There are over 2,700 species of mosquitoes and it is difficult to determine which ones are biting you when you go for a sunset walk or work in the garden. Rural Arizonans are fortunate because mosquitoes are not major nuisances most of the time. Mosquitoes can be especially numerous after the summer rains and near areas with standing water. To add to the local mosquito problem, a non-native species of mosquito,
Aedes aegypti, has come to southern Arizona. If you have ever been in Tucson near twilight and have been bitten around the ankles, you probably have experienced this mosquito.

My research at UA focuses on determining where the Aedes aegypti in Cochise and Pima Counties originally came from. This is a large task because mosquitoes can easily be transported cross-country in a car or they can lay tiny eggs in flower pots or tires and these can be shipped long distances. Using techniques of genetics and molecular biology, I am assembling a “family tree” of this mosquito species and I will be able to determine the likely origins of these mosquitoes.

Sam Merrill, UBRPer in Dr. Henry Hagedorn’s lab, Entomology