Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is a major center of research for the bioremediation of nuclear waste, and world leaderin genetically engineered anti-material research. Oak Ridge (with the Center for Environmental Biotechnology of the University of Tennessee), has conducted the first field test of a genetically engineered bioremediation bacteria. For GMO microbe tests, Oak Ridge has constructed unique high-security field lysimetry facility (pictured), a series of twenty enclosed containers with a total capacity of over 250 square meters of soil. (17)
The Environmental Microbial Biotechnology Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, California features a high-tech industrial-sized production system for biodegradative microbes and enzymes. Livermore's big fermenter (1,500 liters, pictured) has mass-produced Methylosinus trichosporium, an organism that degrades trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent. Smaller fermenters at Livermore have been used to produce hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes and genetically engineered bacteria for biomedical experiments.
The US Department of Energy's Microbial Genome Program focuses on genomics of classical bioweapons and material degrading organisms. One of the program’s goals is to create "super bugs" to "uncover applications relevant to DOE missions." DOE's missions include bioremediation and industrial processing, as well as weapons design. The Program has sequenced more than 20 microbes that degrade metals, hydrocarbons, cellulose, and industrial chemicals. (18)
The US military is also researching anti-material microbes, and it is this work that is of the highest concern. The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, has a program "focused on identifying and characterizing the degradative potential of products from naturally-occurring microorganisms". NRL then takes natural microbes and creates genetically engineered organisms with " focused degradative capabilities". These include microbes designed to destroy plastics, particularly polyurethane, which is used in many products, including coatings used on aircraft. Such genetically engineered microorganisms might be applied themselves, or enzymes they produce can be formulated to be applied on a target. One NRL microbe can "cause hundreds of blisters on mil[itary] spec[ification] polyurethane paints in 72 hours." (20) The NRL principal investigator has described military applications for such weapons: "It is quite possible that microbial derived or based esterases might be used to strip signature control coatings from aircraft, thus facilitating detection and destruction of the aircraft." (21)
My research group is presently focused on the unravelling of the structure and catalytic mechanism of methyl-coenzyme M reductase in methanogenic and methanotrophic archaea and of the iron-sulfur-cluster free hydrogenase in these microorganisms. From the results only those obtained for methyl-coenzyme M reductase are described in the following. For the results on the iron-sulfur-cluster free hydrogenase the reader is referred to the report by Seigo Shima.
UIn our work on the structure and function of methyl-coenzyme M reductase my group is collaborating with Seigo Shima from our Institute, with Ulrich Ermler from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, with Friedrich Widdel from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiolgy in Bremen and with Bernhard Jaun and Arthur Schweiger from the ETH Zürich.
