Learning from the life living in Superfund sites

Learning from the life living in Superfund sites

On a cool December day in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014, a group of academic and citizen scientists set off onto one of the most polluted 3 km stretches of water in the US. They’d soon find a thriving community of microbes living in toxic sludge about a meter below the water.

One of those keen researchers was Elizabeth Hénaff, who had just joined Chris Mason’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow. Several months earlier, two members of the Brooklyn community biology lab Genspace had approached Mason with an intriguing proposal. They wanted to study the bottom of the Gowanus Canal, an infamously toxic body of water, before the US Environmental Protection Agency dredged its bottom and covered it with an impermeable layer.

Hénaff says you can see, via the microbes that the team detected, how the Gowanus Canal was plagued by industrial waste dumping and commercial shipping activities, resulting in a chemical soup of infamous pollutants. “One interesting takeaway is this idea of microbial memory that’s maintained by these nonhuman organisms,” Hénaff says. “It’s a memory of the history of human intervention in a site.”

Read more at Chemical and Engineering News