Today, I'm going to create an oil spill in my home and then try to clean it up.
That would be a total nightmare to deal with. So I'm going to use these tanks instead.
That is good.
Look at that estimation.
This one here will be my control and this spill, I'm going to try and clean up using bacteria.
Cleaning up oil using bacteria might sound kind of ridiculous, but it's not. Just hear me out.
After some of the biggest oil spills in US history,
microbes have been the first to show up. In April 2010, a crew on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig
was closing up an oil well in the Gulf of Mexico when a surge of high pressure methane gas shot
up into the drilling rig, where it exploded and killed 11 workers.
Over the next three months, that well spewed more than 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools
worth of oil into the ocean. And as governments and the oil industry were
trying to deal with the disaster, so were microbes, specifically bacteria.
Oil is really just a mix of different hydrocarbons and following the spill,
bacteria started gobbling them up. By “gobbling them up” I mean metabolizing
them—gaining energy and releasing carbon dioxide and water as byproducts.
Bacteria are actually more like us than you might think. They also need food,
in this case it’s just chains of hydrocarbons and not a sandwich. Most bacteria also need oxygen to
metabolize that food. Fortunately, with the Deepwater Horizon spill,
currents in the Gulf of Mexico continued to bring in oxygen so that the bacteria
could keep metabolizing hydrocarbons. Some species of bacteria metabolized smaller
hydrocarbons like ethane while other species broke down longer hydrocarbon chains, like n-hexadecane.
So let's do this.
Oh, I opened the wrong side.
Okay. Well that's a lot of bacteria.
Um, I'm going to try and spread it out.
We still got this under control. Don't worry. Don't worry. I'd say there's enough bacteria
in there. So, uh, now we just have to wait and see what happens. Look, look,
look, it's starting to break stuff apart so you can see all of a sudden that there's
sort of like bubbles popping up. There's a lot of movement that I don't think is just
because I dumped a bunch of stuff in there. I do think that it's because the microbes
are actually becoming active. So yeah, so much bacteria in here probably more than I
would've put if I hadn't accidentally dumped a bunch in, but I'm very interested to see
what they do. Okay. Yeah. This is going to take a sec. So while we wait and let
these bacteria do their thing, let's talk about some other cool stuff that they can clean up.
There are a lot of researchers looking at not only how bacteria can turn hazardous stuff into
stuff that's less terrible for us, but how they can remove it from the environment altogether.
One example of something bacteria can /remove/ is URANIUM—yes, the radioactive
element used to power nuclear reactors and was used to create the atomic bomb. The
US actually has a lot of uranium-contaminated aquifers and soil left over from the Cold War.
So some bacterial species use uranium to gain energy. So if you've studied cellular
respiration you might remember that metabolizing food generates a bunch of electrons. Those
electrons need to go somewhere for the process to continue. For us, the electrons get dumped onto
oxygen when we breathe. In the case of these bacteria, they dump the electrons on uranium.
More recently, researchers also figured out that these bacteria can soak up uranium
using lipopolysaccharide chains. These are lipid, or fat, molecules linked to strands
of sugar molecules anchored on the outer membrane of the cell, and it turns out
that a particular form of lipopolysaccharide soaks up uranium like a sponge. The cell then
forms something called a vesicle, where the membrane with the lipopolysaccharide layer
starts to close in on itself, creating what kinda looks like a soap bubble.
So the uranium stays trapped, pulled out of the environment, and the bacteria coats
itself with new lipopolysaccharides to start that process all over again.
And, as it turns out, metabolizing oil and cleaning up radioactive elements
are really just the tip of the iceberg for what microbes can do.
There’s a chemical called perchloroethylene, or PCE, which is generally used as a cleaning product
for things like fabrics but also cars—to remove grease from brakes, for example.
It can get into our drinking water, where it has been linked to different types of cancers.
There are bacteria that can actually remove chlorine atoms from PCE
and its breakdown products leaving behind way less toxic compounds,
like ethene. The challenge is getting huge amounts of these bacteria to sites that need PCE cleanup.
In researching all of this, what I found especially cool was that
bacteria that clean up waste like crude oil or PCE or uranium do it on their own.
They haven’t been genetically modified, they’ve just evolved in ways that allow them to do this.
Some researchers are engineering common bacteria,
like E. coli, to remove waste like mercury, but genetic tinkering isn’t always needed.
I mean, after the Deepwater Horizon spill, scientists were ready to bring
in genetically modified bacteria to help gobble up hydrocarbons, but the bacteria
in the Gulf were already hard at work and, over the following days and months the contamination
selected for bacteria that could not only survive but thrive under those extreme conditions.
I want to make it clear that bacteria are helpful but they aren't a free pass for us
to do things that will destroy our planet. Plus it’s not like they magically clean up everything.
Okay. Let's see what we've got. Even though the experimental looks a little bit crazy
it's because the bacteria are coded in clay and stored that way.
So it has this kind of weird film on it, but I can tell that there are less big globs of oil
in this one compared to this one. So, although I don't see a massive difference between these,
I do think that the bacteria did help break apart. Some of the oil in this one,
you know, if I was going to really help them out, I would have done something to air rate the water.
So similar to what the Gulf of Mexico did for the deep water horizon spill, bringing in that oxygen
to help the microbes do their thing. So, you know, pretty solid experiment and really just
makes me excited to see what people might be able to do with bacteria in the future.