Project
MEDALE: medicine degradation by adaptive laboratory evolution
Many useful and advanced molecules such as PFAS, organic solvents and hormones are currently used for a wide variety of applications. At the end of their service life, these components end up in surface- or ground waters and in this way may accumulate in food crops. Some of them show hardly any biodegradation in the aquatic environment and accumulate in the environment or even worse in the human body (e.g. for PFAS).
In this project we aim to use micro-organisms, by use of their catalytic enzymes, to degrade these compounds at more concentrated waste streams sites where these type of compounds leak into the environment. We have identified a number of sites where these compounds are found in concentrations that allow microbial or enzymatic degradation when implemented in a full water purification process. This project enables development of the best enzymatic pathways for biodegradation of these persistent water contaminating compounds by leveraging the strength of enzyme catalysis with adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE).The project will showcase the power of this technology to develop bacteria that degrade selected persistent compounds from various chemical classes.
The approach will harness the power of ALE to naturally edit enzymes (and of course the genes they are derived from) such that these will result in optimal biodegradation of these compounds. This unique way of gene editing allows for determination of the mutations that result in an optimal enzyme pathway for biodegradation of the compounds of high concern. The here developed tools can be leveraged as a low-cost and fast key generic R&D tool for development of micro-organisms or enzymes that allow biodegradation of almost any compound of interest. We expect this to greatly enhance the global application of bioremediation for compounds of high concern. All insights from this study will be publicly shared to allow reproduction of this key enabling technology by the rest of the bioremediation industry.