We may have found an ally in our fight against PFAS chemicals.
Diana Aga, Henry M. Woodburn Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor of chemistry and the director of the RENEW Institute at the University at Buffalo, looks into this.
Diana Aga is an environmental and analytical chemist. As Henry M. Woodburn Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Chemistry, Aga leads a team that studies how a wide range of chemicals affect the environment. This work has included research on persistent organic pollutants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals.”
Projects have focused on detecting known and unknown contaminants, removing them from municipal and agricultural wastewater, developing new technologies to degrade persistent organic pollutants, and understanding the impact of pollutants on the environment, humans and wildlife.
Aga’s work is local and global, ranging from studies on the bioaccumulation of pollutants in fish and common terns in the Great Lakes region, to research investigating the presence of pharmaceuticals, personal care products, antibiotics and antibiotics resistance genes in waters in the U.S., Asia and Europe. She has engaged with international institutions, including the World Health Organization, to combat antimicrobial resistance, one of the greatest threats in modern medicine and public health.
Aga is director of the UB RENEW Institute, a university-wide, multidisciplinary research institute that focuses on complex energy and environmental issues, as well as the social and economic issues with which they are connected.
Bacteria Found to Eat Forever Chemicals
In the quest to take the “forever” out of “forever chemicals,” bacteria might be our ally.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have been called “forever chemicals” because of their worrisome persistence. These chemicals, which have now been found to contaminate all types of environments, can have harmful effects on people, even at very low concentrations. Most of the efforts to remove PFAS from the environment involve capturing PFAS in solid materials. But the problem with this approach is that you still need to find a way to dispose the materials so that PFAS do not re-contaminate the environment again.
My colleagues and I explored a different approach: to break apart PFAS into less harmful forms using bacteria that can destroy the carbon-fluorine bonds that make PFAS very persistent. This bacterial strain, called Labrys portucalensis F11—have never been tested for their ability to degrade PFAS. So, we decided to try it.
We placed the bacteria in sealed flasks with three types of PFAS for about 3 months; one of these PFAS was perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, or PFOS, which is detected globally, and that was designated as hazardous by the United States Environmental Protection Agency last year.
What sets our study apart from other biodegradation studies reported to date is that we accounted for the PFAS byproducts formed, and demonstrated that F11 bacteria broke some of these byproducts into smaller PFAS, and eventually to undetectable levels.
Someday, we hope to see F11 be used to clean up PFAS contamination in the environment. But there are still many steps needed to get to this point. Meanwhile, our next step in advancing this research will be to learn how to encourage F11 to break down PFAS even when more readily accessible energy sources are available for them to eat, which is the case in real-world scenarios.
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