Our People - Microbes and the Environment

Expertise:

• Remediation technologies using chemical and photochemical techniques
• Wastewater and air treatment using advanced oxidation processes
• Infection and pathogen control, including rapid detection methods for bacterial contamination of water, automated UV disinfection systems, ultrasonic disinfection, and novel antimicrobial materials for use in clinical applications
   

Expertise:

• Plant-microbe interactions
• Symbiotic nitrogen fixation in agriculture
• Functional metagenomics to look at the genomes of organisms present in complex samples such as soil
• Bacterial genome engineering for the production of bioproducts such as polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB)
• Synthetic biology, bioplastics and bioproducts

Publications:

Trevor Charles Publication List

Expertise:

• Microbial diversity and function, especially at contaminated sites (primarily municipal landfills)
• Microbiome analysis (DNA, RNA and protein in metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics) from environmental samples
• Bioremediation tool development from exploration of microbial community interactions

Publications:

Laura Hug's Publication list

Expertise:

• Synthetic biology, including utilizing bacteria for production of chemical precurors and biofuels as well as environmental cleanup
• Biomining using iron/sulphur oxidizing bacteria
• Genetic analysis of new bacterial strains for applications in technology and the environment
• Improvements in PCR technology
• Bio-upcycling to transform waste via bacterial biosynthesis, with a focus on succinic acid

Expertise:

• Microbial carbonation reactions for carbon storage in mine tailings
• Microstucture and chemistry of microbial mats and stromatolites
• Electron and X-ray microscopy of microbial mats and their mineral precipitates
• Microbial nutrient acquisition in polar environments
• Bioremediation of mine waste materials

Expertise:

• World expert on Bangiales – types of red algae
• Red algae of economic importance - they contain compounds (agar, carrageenan, etc.) that are used extensively as thickeners in products such as yogurt, ice cream and toothpaste
• Red algae as food sources - genera such as Porphyra (aka. Nori, laverbread) and Palmaria (a.k.a. Dulse) are important food sources and are global billion-dollar aquaculture industries
• Red algae as a critical group in the evolution of photosynthetic life on earth through secondary endosymbiosis of chloroplasts
• Red algae as a nuisance - (e.g. Cladophora and Chara in Laurentian Great Lakes), invasive species (e.g. Bangia atropupurea in the Great Lakes)
• Cyanobacteria that release toxins and taste and odour compounds in drinking water (Lake Ontario)
   

Expertise:

• Microbial diversity - developing and applying molecular and computational methods to explore complex microbial communities spanning aquatic, terrestrial, and host-associated habitats
• Linking function and phylogeny - by exploring active microorganisms involved in transforming carbon and energy, to better understand who is doing what in the environment
• Nitrogen cycle - using a combination of molecular and cultivation approaches to investigate the microbial community members associated with ammonia oxidation and denitrification

Publications:

Josh Neufeld's Publication List

Expertise:

• Environmental microbiology
• Aquatic virus ecology
• Algal-virus interactions and co-evolution
• Giant virus diversity
• Carbon flow in marine environments

Publications:

Jozef Nissimov's publication list.

Expertise:

• Sustainable agriculture and agroforestry: food security, agrobiodiversity, climate change resilience, carbon sequestration, nitrogen transformations and greenhouse gas emissions in tropical, temperate and sub-arctic biomes
• Biochar: soil health, carbon sequestration, climate change resilience
• Waste to resources: closing the loop between food wastage and its ultimate use as a soil amendment
• Riparian (river bank) land-use systems in agricultural landscapes: determining carbon and nitrogen transformations in terrestrial and aquatic components of the river bank

Expertise:

• Anaerobic membrane bioreactors for wastewater and sludge treatment
• Fate of emerging contaminants in wastewater systems
• Pretreatment of sludges for enhanced digestion
• Advanced sludge digestion processes
• Nutrient recovery from wastewater
• Modelling of wastewater treatment and sludge handling processes
   

Expertise:

• Cycling of key elements in lakes, rivers, forests and agricultural watersheds
• Impacts of climate change and agriculture on aquatic ecosystems
• Development and use of novel tracers, such as stable isotopes and artificial sweeteners, for following impacts on surface water and groundwater
• Indicators of climate change in high arctic and subarctic systems
   

Expertise:

• Peatland greenhouse gas fluxes in both natural and disturbed ecosystems
• Potential impact of climate change on peatlands through plot to ecosystem scale manipulation of temperature and water table and evaluating the subsequent changes in soil properties, plant community and greenhouse gas fluxes
• Peatland restoration
• Peatland methane dynamics including both fluxes and subsurface storage
• Organic matter decomposition
   

Expertise:

• Bio-based production of glycolic acid, allowing for safer and more environmentally conscious cosmetics
• Microbial metabolism, including exploration of new methods to improve yields in synthetic biology
• Metabolic flux, looking especially at proteins, regulators, and pathways involved in microbial metabolism