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As the saying goes, oftentimes "mother knows best."

OSU Engineering faculty and students in the Biological & Environmental Systems research cluster are discovering that some of Mother Nature's smallest organisms produce big results when it comes to cleaning up humanity's toxic messes, developing better implantable medical devices, and making nanoscale materials.

Working with OSU botanists, microbiologists, and plant pathologists, environmental engineering professor Lew Semprini, who directs the Western Region Hazardous Substance Research Center at OSU, is using microorganisms to transform highly toxic chlorinated solvents like Trichloroethylene (TCE) into inert components.

Widely used as an industrial degreaser and dry cleaning agent, TCE now contaminates vast areas of soil where it was carelessly dumped. In collaboration with Stanford University, Semprini and environmental engineering professor Mark Dolan have successfully engineered ways to inject contaminated soils with microbes and then use DNA testing to track how the organisms do the cleanup.

Environmental engineering professors Jack Istok and Brian Wood are using different microbes to stop the spread of sub-surface plumes of nuclear waste.

Bioengineering researchers Michelle Bothwell and Joe McGuire are employing yet another group of microorganisms to make bioactive surfactant coatings that decrease infection and coagulation on implantable medical devices such as stents, catheters, and endotracheal tubes.

“Bacterial adhesion and infection at the site of an implant can be an enormous problem following surgery or endovascular intervention,” McGuire says. “We’re developing biologically active materials that help prevent this.”

Although implants are often coated with traditional antibiotics, doing so increases the risk of producing resistant strains of bacteria. So Bothwell and McGuire are using compounds called lantibiotics, whose unique physical structure prevents resistant strains of bacteria from developing. “We’re the first to be working with lantibiotics at biomaterial interfaces,” McGuire says.

Collaborating with the OSU College of Veterinary Medicine enables Bothwell and McGuire to move toward their ultimate goal of developing a method for applying these biologically active materials to implants as the devices are being manufactured.

“You can do things at a vet school that you can’t readily do at a medical school,” McGuire says. “This is an advantage for us here at OSU.”

Chemical engineering, professor Greg Rorrer has enlisted a species of algae to help clean up toxic TNT that is leaking from unexploded munitions on the ocean floor (see sidebar), and has discovered that single-celled marine organisms called diatoms might contain the key for producing nanoparticles that the hightech industry has found complicated and costly to produce using other means. “We’ve succeeded in getting diatoms to take up significant quantities of germanium, a semiconductor material related to silicon that has optical and electronic properties with many high-tech applications,” says Rorrer, who also works with Chih-hung Chang, a chemical engineering professor with expertise in electronic materials. “Currently, germanium oxide nanoparticles are produced by industry at very high temperatures, in a vacuum, using laser beams. We’re using a simple biological process at room temperature to make these nanoparticles inside the diatoms, letting the nanobiochemical machinery of the diatom cell do all the synthetic work. It’s incredible.”

Rorrer’s research in these areas is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

Other players in this research cluster include professors Peter Nelson, Dorthe Wildenschild, and Ken Williamson, head of the departments of both Chemical Engineering and Civil, Construction, & Environmental Engineering. “By putting all of these people together in one research cluster, you gain phenomenal momentum, crossfertilization of ideas, and critical mass,” Williamson says.