Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Christopher Ignacio Olivares Martinez
Engineering and Computer Science
Civil & Environmental Engineering
UC Irvine
A New Paradigm to Discover Microorganisms to Fully Biodegrade PFAS, the Forever Chemicals
The overarching objective of this project is to accelerate the discovery and evolution of microorganisms capable of biodegrading per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). These so-called forever chemicals are highly resistant to biodegradation and chemical transformation. About 34% of drinking water systems nationwide exceed recent regulatory limits for PFAS, and cleaning up PFAS contamination presents tension between large financial costs of pollution remediation and the need to protect public health. Biodegradation offers a sustainable and potentially affordable treatment option compared to the high energy demands of chemical methods. No robust PFAS biodegradation approach exists, largely because of two biochemical roadblocks: 1) the evolution of specialized defluorination enzymes is limited by natural ‘chance’ mutation rates and the absence of natural PFAS analogs in the environment, and 2) expected fluoride release from PFAS biodegradation can be very toxic to microorganisms. In this project, I propose to address these barriers by 1) developing high-throughput approaches to enrich microbial communities that tolerate elevated fluoride, and 2) pioneering accelerated microbial evolution to enhance microbial PFAS transformation. By directly targeting fluoride toxicity and mutation-rate limitations, accelerated laboratory evolution could enable microbial pathways that remove the ‘forever’ from forever chemicals. If successful, this approach could establish a new paradigm for discovering biodegradation strategies for PFAS and other future contaminants of concern.
