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- [Chris] So if you think of a superfund site,
a heavily toxic, polluted environment,
you might think of it being far away and away from people,
but in the case of the Gowanus Canal,
it's right in the middle of New York City,
surrounded by eight million people,
and really impacts a lot of human health,
and we had no idea what to find,
and when we got in there to look at the biology,
it really kind of blew our minds.
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- Are you sure we are in the right place?
- You know, we're here to meet Chris Mason
from Weill Cornell.
He is an expert on extremophiles,
and he told us to meet him here
and I wasn't sure about that.
- In the middle of Brooklyn
to study extremophiles?
- [Jacques] You know, that's a really good question
that only Chris can answer, and a good thing that he's here.
- [Chris] Welcome! - [Irene] Hi, Chris!
- [Chris] Welcome.
- Why are we here?
- Welcome to the Gowanus Canal.
This is a superfund site in the middle of Brooklyn,
where we can actually find new extremophiles
and the new forms of life.
- Tell us about the history of this place.
- The canal was really just a trading creek,
but it became more important for industrial use,
so they dredged it and made it into a canal,
which is the shape you see today,
and then more and more industry, heavy industry,
was built up along the canal, the 1800s.
A lot of it was very much for coal tar
and tanneries and refineries
that were dumping a lot of their waste into the canal,
hoping most of it would go back out into the ocean.
Of course, a lot of it stayed here,
and built up a residue at the bottom of the canal,
which created this sort of toxic sludge,
which is what we're excited about today to dig into.
- Once the samples has a sequence,
what kind of information do you get out of it?
- We get all the DNA that's present.
Anywhere from 20% or 30%
to as much as 80% of all the DNA
doesn't match any known organism
because it's never been cultured before
or it's never been seen before.
- [Irene] So what have you seen so far?
- So, not only do we get the species
of what organisms are present,
and what genus and what species,
but we can see that, actually, they're processing toxins
out of the environment, like acetone or toluene,
or volatile organic compounds.
- Do you also see pathogens?
- In the Gowanus Canal, we've seen a very limited number
of what would be human pathogens.
I think it's because the environment is so different
from what you'd normally find on, say,
human skin or human bodies.
The biggest threat to the canal
would just be the toxins themselves.
- How do you manage to get all this done?
- Really, the only reason a lot of it gets done
is it's a team effort, so between the community labs
and landscape architects and designers,
and scientists here in the lab, members of the laboratory
really leading their project,
Dr. Henaff is the one in particular
who's been leading the project from within the lab
so really getting a good team together
to help get everything from the samples from the canal
to extract it, to prep, to sequence, to analyze,
and then write up the results, it all is a team effort.
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- How are the microorganism distributed in the canal,
and how are they stratified?
- To give you a sort of visual,
you can see if you look at sort of the waves here,
where we do the sample collection,
and you go down a little bit in the water,
it starts to get very, very silty and thick.
When we sample, usually, we'll take this tube
and sample a little bit into the sludge,
and we can see here, that because, essentially,
levels of oxygen are going much lower
as you get further down into the sludge,
these are more anaerobic bacteria.
They don't use oxygen at all and they don't actually
even use normal sort of chemical processes
that you'd find for things that are on the surface.
There are not only differences of prokaryotes and bacteria
that are there but, of course,
the viruses change their diversity depending on
sort of who they're hanging around with.
They're controlling the ecosystem as well.
There are these biosynthetic gene clusters,
which are essentially clusters of gene
that are positioned next to each other and co-regulated.
Some of the organisms had clusters
that looked like they could process toluene
and actually use this to remove toluene
from the environment, so we can actually see
that these organisms are present,
being slightly controlled by these phages,
having these enzymes created
that actually can process toluene,
all sort of one big ecosystem all working together.
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- I think it's a privilege that my function in society
would be to figure out how things work,
and I think that with that privilege comes a certain
responsibility to make that meaningful,
and so this is one of the kinds of projects
that I feel I can concretely give something
back to the community.
It definitely came as a surprise,
the fact that the bacteria have these pathways
that encode the genes that are necessary
to degrade the toxicity.
That definitely came as a surprise
and I think it's actually quite beautiful
that what we think of as the most unenvironmental
of environments actually contains the solution
to its own toxicity.
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- This is really, I think, a good template
for how to engage citizen science as well as community.
I think other groups can start to have some back and forth
between community to laboratories,
designers, architects, scientists
all coming together to improve what's happening
in cities everywhere.
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- So that was the right place after all.
- It was, and you would never expect to see extremophiles
in an urban environment like this.
- Isn't it cool to see how many people
were involved in studying them?
- You know, sequencing is becoming so accessible
to these community groups, to planners,
that they can use it to monitor the environment,
and that could actually be a great model
for other cities to follow.
- Yeah, really.
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