North America's dependence on fossil fuels inevitably leads to the accidental release of hydrocarbons into the environment. Voordouw's research is, in part, devoted to studying bacteria that can degrade these toxic pollutants. This process, called bioremediation, can occur naturally in contaminated environments. The goal of the research is to describe the community composition in contaminated areas, and find out how that composition changes with exposure to different pollutants. As an environmental molecular microbiologist, Voordouw says that dealing with species diversity poses a major challenge.
Microbial communities contain a large scope of organisms that perform a variety of functions.
This complexity makes the task of sorting out the role of individual bacteria very difficult. First, bacteria are isolated from a contaminated environment. The bacteria are then tested for their ability to degrade toxic pollutants. DNA from each organism is checked to ensure that each isolate is unique. The DNA is then sequenced to help identify the species and strain.