Biotechnology advances for xenobiotics degradation and resource recovery in wastewater

The early application of centralized wastewater treatment has emerged at the beginning of 20th century in pace with the start of fast urbanization. With the ever-growing wastewater amount, intensive resource consumption, and climate change issue in 21st century, the goal of the engineered system has been extending from protecting the environment and public health to recycle and reuse water and resources. Although biological wastewater treatment has been developed to harness the capacity of microorganisms for contaminants removal, we still have little insight into the interplay between contaminants and microorganisms, in particular, what kind of microorganisms could evolve capacities to degrade an increasing amount of artificial “xenobiotic” compounds resulting from the modern activity of homo sapiens, which value-added chemicals could be effectively recovered from the waste streams by desirable microbial community; and how we can identify and regulate reactor-microbiomes for such purposes. The development of sequencing technology to rapidly acquire whole genomic information of microbial isolate or genomes of organisms directly from their habitat (“metagenomics” or ecosystem-level genomics) allows us to extensively acquire genetic resources of diverse microorganisms for their metabolic function analysis. In this seminar, I will demonstrate how we integrate genomic analysis, machine learning and bioreactor engineering to 1) unravel the evolutionary history of the very few bacteria that have adapted to exploit one of the most produced xenobiotics, PET and its monomers; and 2) achieve the production of a low soluble carbon-based value-added chemical, caproate from waste streams. The development of advanced biotechnology could be applied in wastewater treatment with an aim to address the challenges at the nexus of waste, energy, health, and carbon neutrality.