Master's student sees greener future with microbes, methane

When geography master's student Varun Gupta applied for ECO Canada's Student Ambassador Award, not only did he have a chance to win $1,000 but he also discovered a unique opportunity to share his environmental research work with a whole different crowd.

As one of five winners chosen by ECO Canada, an industry-led human resources organization, Gupta was given the chance to present his research to key players in the environment industry at Americana 2011, one of North America's largest environment conferences.

The conference was the perfect opportunity to kick-start my search in terms of employment opportunities outside of academia, says Gupta. I networked with quite a few people from different parts of the industry. It was cool to see what's out there.

Even preparing his application for the award proved to be a worthwhile experience in itself.
I had to write an abstract of my research and talk about how it is relevant to the environmental science industry. My project has an academic point of view but it also has broader applications. It was a challenge but a good way to see my research from a different perspective, he says.

Gupta has been investigating whether or not methane that forms in wetland soils can be oxidized and reduced by an as-yet-unknown group of anaerobic microbes before entering the atmosphere. If this process is occurring, it may be possible to inoculate prominent sources of methane such as man-made landfills, sewage treatment plants and hydroelectric dam reservoirs with the microbes to significantly reduce the release of this greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

His research has taken him to 15 different bog and other wetland sites across North America, including Big Run Bog in the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia and sites in the Hudson Bay Lowlands.

Gupta is currently completing his thesis, in which he hopes to prove that this process, called anaerobic methane oxidation, is in fact occurring in these freshwater ecosystems. He says his preliminary data looks promising. The next step would be to identify the microbes, which could take up to a year. If the microbes can be identified, the biggest and longest-term challenge would then be to isolate the microbes in a pure culture, which could take five to 10 years.

Personally, I think that if it can be done, it will be very significant to the environment. Methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so with the possibility of carbon taxes in the future, many industries will have some incentive to culture this microbe, says Gupta.

His supervisor, Professor Nathan Basiliko, also sees great potential in the future application of Gupta's process to reduce greenhouse gases. He plans to carry on with the research that Gupta has started. Anaerobic methane oxidation is known to exist in other ecosystems such as marine sediments and studies similar to Gupta's have been done in these systems.

Varun's study will be the most conclusive and comprehensive, as it spans many sites that quantifies this virtually unknown microbial process that keeps this key greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, Basiliko says. He's been pushing me to keep researching this, which I think will be the focus of my next NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Discovery Grant.
After Gupta completes his thesis this summer, he plans to find a job in the environmental science industry and continue to be involved in identifying the microbes with Basiliko. After that, Gupta says, the process of isolating the microbes might fall into the realm of the biotech industry.

It's a long-term solution but you have to start to somewhere, he says. I am just laying the foundation.

By Carolyn Wong