Man's trash is a microbe's treasure: the diversity and metabolic potential of microorganisms in landfill solid and liquid waste

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Mankind’s activities have lead to widespread contamination of the environment, from oil plumes in the oceans to landfills across the globe. Many of these contaminants can be transformed by microorganisms in the environment, which convert the compounds to less toxic or completely innocuous substances. Once identified, these microbial activities can be used to remediate contaminated sites - but the vast majority of microbial metabolic potential remains undescribed. The non-profit organization Pure Earth labeled municipal landfills #5 in the world’s worst pollution problems (www.worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/100), reflecting landfills’ complex contaminant profiles and potential impacts on both the environment and human health. Microbial activity within landfills is critical for decomposition of inorganic and organic wastes, but the organisms, pathways, and processes involved are poorly understood. Dr. Laura Hug’s research program seeks to define microbial diversity and identify currently unknown metabolic functions at contaminated sites, with a particular focus on landfills. To that end, her research group will sequence the total DNA and RNA of a microbial community from several locations in a municipal landfill, generating a blueprint of which organisms are present, and which pathways are active. To develop new bioremediation tools, Dr. Hug’s team will capture activities of interest through enrichment culturing, where a less complex microbial community is maintained in the laboratory. The combination of community-scale metabolic modelling through meta-omic analyses and the ability to track contaminant degradation in the laboratory with enrichment culture experiments will uncover how microbes are shaping their environment. The proposed research has considerable potential to discover microbial activities that can be used to remediate toxins in the environment, helping to clean up Canadian contaminated sites and freshwater resources. This work will inform waste management policies, remediation requirements, and industrial best practices across Canada. Beyond developing tools for environment remediation, the proposed research examines essential questions in biology - how do organisms adapt to the harsh conditions at contaminated sites? How and when did the ability to degrade man-made products evolve? In what ways are microbial communities more than the sum of their parts, and do these interactions drive global cycles? This research program will expand our understanding of the tree of life, while simultaneously developing solutions to address the impacts of human activities on the environment.