The project aims to investigate the impacts of biosolids biochar immobilized bacteria on soil microbial activity and diversity during arsenic phytoremediation.

Thesis underway.

People excrete antibiotics and many types of bacteria, and this mixture can become concentrated in wastewater treatment plants. A specific part of the wastewater treatment process, ‘anaerobic digestion’, is particularly associated with the selection, emergence, and growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These scientists want to find out if different ‘anaerobic digestion’ conditions are associated with increases, or decreases, in the numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. They plan to find out by setting up relatively small, bench-sized anaerobic digesters in their laboratory, inoculating them with sludge from a full-scale working digester, then study the effects of different physico-chemical conditions on the incidence and frequency of DNA sequences of antibiotic-resistant genes and the ribosomal RNA sequences commonly used to identify different species of bacteria.