INNOVATION May-June 2017

f ea t u r e s

and underground copper–gold mine in south–central British Columbia in 2013. Like many BC mines, Mount Polley faced the issue of how to remove metals and sulphates from tailings pond water before the company could get permits to release it back into the environment. Together with her PhD student at the time, Dr. Baldwin tested bench-scale bioreactors in the UBC laboratory to show how a passive system could be set up and operated to remove sulphate and selenium from tailings water. A pilot-scale water treatment facility was built at the mine. “This type of treatment system uses natural biogeochemical processes to remove metals and sulphates from the tailings pond water,” she says. “We used genomics to show that the lab and pilot reactors were hosting the right kinds of microorganisms for this application.” Bioremediation employs microbes to convert the sulphates back into sulphides and precipitate the metals out of the water. Fortunately, many of these active sulphate-reducing bacteria are found naturally in lakes and wetlands. “If you poke at the sediments at the bottom, you can see little bubbles come up and sometimes get a nasty smell,” Dr. Baldwin says. “That’s hydrogen sulphide. These are the most useful microorganisms for metal

Microorganisms, for example, have been used to extract metal from piles of low-grade ore for several decades. It was crudely understood that microbes remove the copper or gold from ore, but little was known about the details of ‘who’ or ‘how.’ By applying genomics to the problem, the right questions are now being asked: Who are these microbes? What should they be fed to encourage them to dissolve metals more efficiently? What is the ideal temperature, acidity, wetness, and rock size to optimize metal recovery? “It’s like making beer. If you don’t know how to make beer, you can throw in yeast, you can put in water, but you’re never going to make beer Genomics uses DNA-sequencing technology to decode the genetic information contained in an organism’s DNA. For a soil or water sample, the results show what microorganisms are present and, by looking at the RNA, proteins, and metabolites they produce, what the microbes might be up to. The costs and barriers to using genomics technology across a range of industries are falling. Most of the genomic techniques used today were developed in the field of human health more than a decade ago. Since 2001, the cost of sequencing an organism’s genome has fallen from almost $10,000 per sample to less than $1. out of it,” Takács-Cox says. Cheaper, Faster, Better

“Human genomics was the biggest sector three or four years ago, but now it’s less” says Genome BC’s Chief Scientific Officer and VP of Sector Development Dr. Catalina Lopez-Correa. “The mining, agri-food, and forestry sectors adopted genomics a little later but, since there are fewer barriers in terms of regulation, ethics, and approvals compared to human genetics, the uptake from end users and commercial applications are developing much faster.” Foresters, for example, use genetic marker–assisted breeding to select the best seedlings for strong, tall, climate- adapted plots. Accurate genomics tools help the dairy industry breed healthy, productive cows. Mining is also benefitting from genomics. Cleaning the Water in Mine Tailings Ponds Dr. Susan Baldwin, P.Eng., has been working with mining companies on passive bioremediation of mine waters at sites across western Canada for almost a decade. “Back in the day, they just put the metals into a wetland and hoped for the best,” says the University of British Columbia (UBC) Chemical and Biological Engineering professor. “Nowadays, there’s a huge amount of science and engineering behind it.” Dr. Baldwin started working at Imperial Metal’s Mount Polley open-pit

Questioning the “fiction” in science fiction.

Enhance your career in energy with an M.S. in Energy Management.

New York Institute of Technology Vancouver Campus

nyit.edu/vancouver

2 2 M A Y/J U N E 2 017

i n n o v a t i o n