Uranium-contaminated site yields wealth of information on microbes 10 feet under
Thursday, September 27, 2012 - 14:00
in Biology & Nature
At sites contaminated with heavy metals, remediation often involves feeding the naturally occurring bacteria in the soil to encourage them to turn soluble metals into solids that won't leech into aquifers and streams. To find out what these microbes are doing, scientists performed a metagenomic analysis of the underground microbial community at one former uranium mill site in Colorado, assigning more than 150,000 sequenced genes to 80 bacteria and Archaea.