microbiology: developing a new bacteria

[smartcookie]

I am currently researching some topics that i am interested in for my science project. And i came across an experiment about biowarfare and a virus that destroys bacteria. It got me thinking about the recent Bp oil spill and the bacteria they are using to eat the oil. I was wondering if it was possible for a high school student such as myself to obtain the tools to develop or improve an oil eating bacteria to be more efficient. Is the level of this project too advanced??

[Walker]

Hi there,

I imagine this could be a workable project for you. Even if you don't have access to the lab resources to develop a "new" kind of bacterium using a molecular engineering approach (such as you might find in a biowarfare lab), there's no reason you can't design a project that attempts to develop something similar using the same approach that nature uses: evolution. After all, nature makes "new" bacteria all the time, and does so not by designing them in a lab, but through the mechanism of natural selection. You can harness this mechanism for your own study.

A population of bacteria will readily evolve towards an adaptive solution to whatever you challenge them with. The time scale over which this takes place (and hence the appropriateness of the experiment for your purposes) depends on the nature of the challenge you give them. For example, if you give them a fairly simple environmental challenge such as growing at a lower temperature, there are multiple pathways that the bacteria can "tweak" to make marginal improvements in their growth rate under this new condition and you can expect to see the emergence of a new strain of low-temperature-adapted bacteria within a convenient experimental timeframe. If you give them a big challenge that requires a really novel solution (say the evolution or co-option of a new degradative enzyme to make use of a novel carbon source such as crude oil), you may have created a situation that will not be solved over a short time period in your culture flask, but that has in fact been solved by some bacterium somewhere, and you may be able to isolate wild bacteria from an appropriate habitat that have evolved the ability you're looking for. (For example, after decades of widespread use of the antibacterial compound Triclosan in hand soap, it's now possible to isolate bacteria from municipal water supplies that can grow on Triclosan as their only carbon source!) So you may be able to find environmental isolates that have some property (oil-eating?) that you're interested in, and characterize that property (how it works, whether it's encoded on the bacterial chromosome or in a plasmid, etc.).

While the new processes and solutions evolved are the "ends" of natural selection and are interesting in their own right, the process of evolution itself is a fascinating topic and one that you could design a fun study about. For example, what kind of selective regimes are the bacteria best able to adapt to, and what kinds of changes lead to extinction? Is the time course of adaptation predictable or repeatable? Does evolution go faster in complex environments or in homogeneous environments? Etc.

Hope some of these thoughts are helpful. Good luck as you design your experiment!

-Will