Nitrogen Cycling in Canadian Soda Lakes
The Canadian Rockies feature a rich diversity of alkaline soda lakes. Some of these lakes contain prolific microbial mats mainly consisting of large, filamentous cyanobacteria. Our team enriched a community consisting of such a cyanobacterium and its associated heterotrophs. This community has potential for biotechnology, both for bioenergy production and production of phycocyanin, a natural blue pigment for food and beverage. The research is in part performed at field scale in our outdoor raceway pond. It also features fieldwork to learn more about the natural environment of the associated microorganisms. A spin off company was established, check out https://www.synergiabiotech.com/. This project uses a combination of field work (sampling soda lakes), laboratory cultivation, outdoors experiments, nanopore sequencing and cloud computation.

Geo-pops (For growing Enigmatic Microbes from Groundwater)
Together with Alberta Environments and Parks, our group surveys groundwater samples for interesting microbes. Groundwater contains a large diversity of Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryotes, that have never been grown in labs and that are evolutionary unrelated to anything we really know. In this research, we survey microbial biodiversity in groundwater from across the Province of Alberta. We then engineer microcosms, “Geo-pops”, and offer them to interesting groundwater microbiomes for growth, enabling new microbes to grow in new and original ways. Microbes can grow all by themselves or depend on pthers as predators or symbionts. This project uses a combination of field work (sampling groundwater), laboratory growing, nanopore sequencing and cloud computation.