Microbial resource management

Microbes are natural recyclers and transformers and can adapt to a variety of food sources due to their large arsenal of encoded functions. We use these microbial abilities to study enzyme-based recycling and bioremediation applications.

See the projects that we're working on, below.

Microbial plastic degradation to support a circular economy

Most plastic waste ends up in landfills or the environment, and only a small fraction (less than 15 per cent) is currently recycled in Australia. We aim to develop microbe-based solutions to upcycle plastic waste to higher value products, increasing recycling incentives to move towards a circular economy.

This project aims to recover and isolate potential polymer degrading microbes from a wide range of habitats, including the gut of superworms, hydrothermal springs, and landfill sites.

Project team: Christian Rinke (CI)

Cultivation of biouseful microorganisms from thermal environments

Thermal environments contain a wealth of enzymes associated with the biosynthesis and degradation of large macromolecules and complex compounds in these environments. The metabolic features of these thermally tolerant microorganisms could be adapted to industrial processes either for the formation or catabolism of biomolecules.

This project aims to isolate from thermal environments relevant microorganisms that have the metabolic capabilities associated with the following processes:

biosynthesis of polyhydroxyalkanoates from amino acids or fatty acids
hydrolysis of aromatic compounds by P450s
degradation of long chain alkanes by Bacteria and Archaea.

Project team: Paul Evans (CI), Yang Lu, Gemma Laird
Collaborators: James De Voss

Microbial plastic degradation to support a circular economy  

This project aims to recover and isolate potential polymer degrading microbes from a wide range of habitats, including the gut of superworms, hydrothermal springs, and landfill sites.

Project team: Christian Rinke (CI)