Where in the World? Oceania

Heybridge, Tasmania

Developing a biological reduction cell to remediate heavy metal and acid-containing industrial and mine leachates: Alison Dann is a Ph.D. candidate whose project is to study the environmental impact of an old industrial production plant in Tasmania. It was operated between 1948 and 1996 in Heybridge, located on the north coast of Tasmania on the Blythe River catchment. During the plant’s operation sulfuric acid/iron oxide waste was discharged directly into Bass Strait, resulting in elevated metal concentrations and a highly visible red plume along the coastline locally suppressing the marine benthic biota and altering biodiversity. The leachate is very similar to acid mine drainage.

A passive in situ bioremediation strategy was developed, in which a series of “cells” and wetlands were built to remove metals and increase pH. The cells consist of a “potato cell” and four “reduction cells.” The “cells” utilize readily available agricultural waste products, potatoes, straw and mushroom compost as organic carbon sources for sulfate-reducing bacteria which reduce sulfate and metals while raising the pH for a healthier environment.

The goals of Alison’s project are to characterize the bacterial community and enhance the system by testing various substrates or manipulations to increase bacterial efficiency of removing the pollutants. She uses MO BIO’s PowerSoil® DNA Isolation Kit to get purified DNA out of the acidic, metal-rich leachate. For PCR and clone library analysis she uses MO BIO’s UltraClean-htp® 96 Well PCR Clean-Up Kit and UltraClean® 6 Minute Plasmid Prep Kits. She also does TRFLP (Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism) to track the bacterial diversity changes over time and using different substrates. Alison mentions that “For TRFLP you need very clean and purified DNA and MO BIO kits provide this every time, I have never had a problem.”

Auckland, New Zealand

The Hidden Secret of Soil: A team of scientists at ESR, Catriona Macdonald, Jacqui Horswell, Rachel Parkinson, Jill Vintiner, are using MO BIO’s PowerSoil® DNA Isolation Kit for soil to extract DNA from soils for forensic purposes.
In forensic science, soil is frequently encountered as trace evidence (e.g. on the sole of a shoe or the tread of a tire) but detailed soil analysis is seldom carried out in routine forensic examination for numerous reasons (e.g. cost, insufficient sample size, access to expertise).
ESR has been developing a technique to compare the microbial “fingerprint” of soils collected from realistic crime scenarios. The soil profiles are representative of the site of collection and therefore could potentially be used as associative evidence to prove a link between suspects and crime scenes.

They have found that the MO BIO PowerSoil® DNA Isolation Kit offers a quick, reliable DNA extraction method for the recovery of DNA from small samples taken from the sole of a shoe, the tread of a tire, and from stains on clothes. New Zealand soils can be notoriously difficult to obtain quality DNA from and amplification of a good PCR product has proved challenging with some soils. Since using the MO BIO PowerSoil® DNA Isolation Kit the ESR team seldom needs further downstream purification of our DNA prior to PCR amplification.
This work has been assisted by MO BIO and is being funded by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology Pre-Seed Accelerator Fund - the outcome of which is to produce a prototype Soil-DNA Fingerprinting Kit for use in routine forensic soil analysis.

Crayfish Point Marine Reserve, Australia

Kevin Redd, PhD candidate, and colleages at the School of Zoology, Marine Research Laboratories, Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute (TAFI)-University of Tasmania use UltraClean® Fecal DNA Isolation Kit and UltraClean-htp® 96 Well Soil DNA Isolation Kit for their research.

The goals of the project are to examine the range of prey consumed by the southern rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii) and to further the understanding of the role that this predator has in the marine environment. In Australia, rock lobsters are the basis of important commercial and recreational fisheries and are sold live to discerning international markets. We have developed non-lethal techniques to collect fecal material from live rock lobsters so that our sampling efforts can be conducted in marine protected areas and in conjunction commercial fishing operations.

DNA-based techniques have proven to be very effective in cases where conventional gut content analysis by dissection is not practical or ethically feasible. The UltraClean® Fecal DNA Isolation Kit gives the best results for isolating high quality DNA from the collected lobster fecal material and facilitates PCR based prey detection. Newly emerging techniques in molecular biology are being used to identify prey species by their unique DNA signatures in these fecal samples after the DNA is isolated with the UltraClean® Fecal DNA Isolation Kit.

We are currently using universal PCR primers to create clone libraries of all rock lobster prey items and designing species-specific PCR primers to detect prey in dietary samples. The sampling of lobsters occurs across a broad range of habitats and geographic regions and will include marine protected areas as well as heavily fished locations. The results of this field study, funded by the Australian Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (FRDC), will be used to determine both habitat and prey utilization as well as ecosystem based effects of fishing on the wild population of southern rock lobsters in Tasmania.

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