Research Initiation Award: Methanogenic Waste Digestion for Tetracycline Degradation

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Research Initiation Awards (RIAs) provide support for junior faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) who are starting to build a research program, as well as for mid-career faculty who need to re-direct and re-build a research program. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member?s research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the researcher's home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences.Benedict College will research how to remove tetracycline from waste streams because antibiotic resistance associated with tetracycline in these wastes is increasing, and may result in more antibiotic-resistant pathogens to humans and other ecological receptors. The approach of this study is from a process engineering perspective, to use harvested swine and municipal waste cultures in small batch reactors, modifying parameters such as pH, operating temperatures, and solids retention times to optimize performance in terms of tetracycline degradation and methane production rates. The goal of the RIA project is to utilize anaerobic biological waste digestion in an attempt to maximize biological degradation of tetracycline, and also to capitalize on the methanogenesis that occurs in these waste streams. Biologically degrading tetracycline-containing waste in the context of methanogenesis has the added advantage of using the methane for operational energy use, or as a combustible fuel to heat-treat the effluent for thermal abiological destruction of tetracycline. The educational impacts of this research are to train underrepresented minority students in cross-disciplinary research, combining engineering with microbiology, and training them in emerging contaminant removal and clean and renewable energy engineering. Emergingcontaminant removal and renewable energy research and engineering are both strong growth sectors of the economy and increasingly important to meet future energy and environmental demands.The RIA expands knowledge on the extent to which biological degradation of pharmaceuticals like tetracycline can be achieved, as well as understanding of the extent of tetracycline degradation that can be achieved in a complex matrix. The research is therefore important because it addresses the above issues, benefitting the global society, while helping to train and place under-represented minorities in these growing research and employment sectors. Students will gain hands-on research skills in microbiology, analytic chemistry, and renewable energy engineering, making them attractive candidates for graduate-level study in the environmental field or in industry. As an Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisidction, the project broadens participation geographically by potentially increasing research capacity and capability statewide.