“From Process Engineering to Microbiology' Applications of Metagenomics in Environmental Engineering”
من هندسة العمليات إلى تطبيقات الميتاجينوميات الميكروبية في الهندسة البيئية
Abstract - Microbiomes are living systems that are essential to organisms and contribute to environmental sustainability in many engineered and natural ecosystems. The advent of molecular tools employing polymerase chain reaction-oriented approaches in the late 1990s revolutionized traditional Environmental Engineering. The focus of many investigations and research efforts shifted from purely looking into engineering parameters to monitor reactor and ecosystem performance to diving into the genomic contents of participating microbial communities. With continued integration and synergism between environmental engineers/scientists, ecologists, microbiologists, and computer scientists, the arrival of whole community-based genomic identification of microbial communities and functional gene expressions using metagenomics and metatranscriptomics has further benefited environmental and ecological engineering. The focus is now to understand the complex interactions among microbial community members and their metabolic potential to help reactor engineering and environmental science. How these complex interactions give rise to emergent properties of/in host-associated and non-host-associated microbiomes is also of paramount importance. Understanding these mechanisms will significantly benefit society, including increased agricultural production, bio-economic advances, improved human health and well-being, and more robust and resilient protection from national security threats, among many others. This talk will present some recent and exciting findings based on whole community omics in engineered bioreactors and freshwater lake systems. The focus has been to understand the role of critical microbes in contaminant removal in the granular-activated sludge process and the occurrence of harmful algal blooms in freshwater lakes.
Brief Bio:
Dr. Ramesh Goel is an environmental engineering and microbiology professor in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Utah. Dr. Goel obtained his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina and a Pos Doctoral fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was also a visiting professor at EAWAG, Switzerland, in 2014. Dr. Goel’s research addresses various issues related to water quality, nutrients in municipal wastewater, virology, and surface water quality. He integrates process engineering and computer bioinformatics to understand complex microbial networks in engineered bioreactors. His research has appeared in many journals of international repute, including Nature Communications, Water Research, Environmental Science & Technology, Bioresource Technology, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Waters, Environmental Pollution, Chemosphere, and more. The U.S. Department of Defense funds his research, U.S. NSF, U.S. DOE, USEPA, and various water quality boards; He is the recipient of numerous research and teaching awards, including the prestigious National Science Foundation young investigator award. He is also serving on the editorial boards of several international journals.
