INNOVATION May-June 2017

With genomics technology costs falling, engineers and researchers at Imperial Metal’s Mount Polley mine ( T op ; D r . S. B aldwin , P.E ng . ) and New Gold’s New Afton mine ( B ottom ; N ew G old ) are investigating how they can harness genetics to monitor environmental health, remediate tailings water, and reclaim mine sites.

sequestration. They generate the sulphide that combines with the metal ions to form insoluble metal sulphides.” However, wetlands and bioreactors may contain undesirable microorganisms, too. These include Thiobacillus , a sulphur- oxidizing bacteria that oxidizes sulphur back to sulphate, releasing rather than capturing the metal ions. This is where genomics becomes a diagnostic tool, Baldwin says. “We take sediment samples and extract the DNA. We sequence the DNA for particular marker genes that tells us what microorganism species are present and what functional genes are present. This tells us what they’re doing, whether it’s sulphate reduction, sulphur oxidation, or denitrification.” The water being passively treated at Mount Polley, however, was so low in dissolved metals that the sulphate- reducing bacteria did not have enough metal to eat, says Imperial Metals’ Chief Scientific Officer Dr. ’ Lyn Anglin, P. Geo. “The mine is presently initiating new research into passive water treatment approaches. We expect that these studies will involve more genomics research.” Since the tailings storage breach at the mine in August 2014, Dr. Baldwin has partnered with Thompson Rivers University Professor Dr. Lauchlan Fraser to identify and observe how the plants and microorganisms in the affected watershed are responding to the spilled tailings. Study plots have been established to test a variety of soil amendments for remediation and the microorganisms active in the sediments. “It’s usually when things go wrong in the environment that you want to know why. That’s where genomics comes in,” says Dr. Baldwin. She says,

Measuring ‘Greenness’ at New Afton T his use of genomics as a diagnostic tool for monitoring ecosystem health led mining company New Gold to set up the first DNA-based mine-site rehabilitation program in Canada at its New Afton copper–gold mine, near Kamloops, BC. The project began when New Gold’s Director of Health Safety Environment and Social Responsibility Dennis Wilson heard about DNA barcoding, a pioneering genomics application developed at the University of Guelph by Dr. Paul Hebert, director of the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. DNA barcoding takes short, distinctive snippets of DNA from organisms around the world, stores them in a digital library, and matches them against unknown samples to

in general and in the areas affected by the Mount Polley breach, genomics can help researchers identify changes in affected ecosystems at the microbial level, improve tools for monitoring bioremediation using microbes, develop molecular markers to monitor metals removal and soil rehabilitation, and conduct controlled trials using microbes to remediate affected ecosystems.

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