Mission of the working group
A risk for human health is given by organic chemicals of industrial, municipal, agricultural and pharmaceutical origin that are widely spread in the terrestrial environment. The most important global contamination pathways for humans worldwide are contaminated food and drinking water as well as dust particles often loaded with chemicals and allergens.
Providing a growing world population with an increasing demand on healthy food, clean drinking water and clean air is a key challenge - now and in the future. Moreover, global climate change is a big research challenge as its impact on healthy food and drinking water production as well as dust in dry seasons needs to be predicted. According to predictions of climate change models precipitations` intensity and frequency are expected to change drastically and therefore new approaches must be developed for a safe and sustainable food and drinking water supply.
Soils mostly act as a major sink of chemicals worldwide and they harbour bacteria, fungi and Archaea being able to transform a tremendous amount of different chemicals. Nevertheless, many chemicals intentionally (e.g. pesticides) or unintentionally (e.g. antiobiotics, PAHs) applied to soils withstand microbial degradation processes for long time periods. Both, the uptake of such residues by plants and the transport of such residues to ground and surface waters as well as remaining chemical residues in surface soils pose a permanent thread for human health.
- Quelle: WHO
Although microbes are able to adapt to the metabolic degradation of chemicals, research results show that such an adaptation of microbes can be very time consuming in terms of decades. Therefore, such processes need to be accelerated in situ in such a way that contamination of soils, food plants and drinking water will be avoided even under changing environmental conditions.
Thus, our activities are divided into three main core area to achieve the expected goals:
- Core area “Enhanced in situ degradation of organic contaminants in soils”:
Isolation and identification of microbial communities being able to degrade selected xenobiotica in soils
Isolation of key microorganisms degrading different xenobiotica in soils
Comparing degradation effectiveness and sustainability of isolated strains and microbial communities
Optimizing carrier material for the inoculation of microbes into soils (Third party funded project with the industry)
Preservation of microbial communities on carrier material for commercial use (Third party funded project with the industry)
High effective breeding of microbes and microbial communities to establish certain degradation functions.
- Core area “Bio-availabilty of xenobiotics in soils”:
Developing approaches to determine “in situ bio-availability” of xenobiotica in soils.
Quantifying the effect of fluctuating soil moisture/wetness on bio-availability and degradation of xenobiotika
- Core area “Quality of bound residues”:
Differentiation between "real" and "pseudo" bound residues: identification and quantification of 14C-labeled biomass molecules resulting from the degradation of 14C-labeled xenobiotics