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To: AugustWest who wrote (10980)	11/1/2002 12:01:07 PM
From: AugustWest	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57110

(COMTEX)Scientists find pollutant-eating germ EAST LANSING, Mich., Oct 31, 2002 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- A newly discovered bacterium can break down tri-chloroethane, a widespread and hard-to-degrade solvent found in nearly half of the more than 1200 U.S. Superfund toxic waste sites, researchers reported Thursday. Dubbed Strain TCA1 by Michigan State University researcher James Tiedje and his colleagues, the micro-organism can degrade tri-chloroethane, or TCA, into the much less harmful chloroethane. When released into the atmosphere, TCA and its biproducts can damage Earth's protective ozone layer. "(Although) trichloroethane is much more difficult to treat, chloroethane is readily degraded by organisms in the environment," Tiedje, director of MSU's Center for Microbial Ecology, told United Press International. Finding a bacterium that can break down TCA means the first difficult step in clean up now can be overcome, he said. "It's another in the pantheon of organisms that we might be able to take advantage of in cleaning up contaminated sites, (although) it is not the end-all, be-all," said James Gossett, an environmental engineer at Cornell University. The current method of decontaminating groundwater laced with TCA and other chlorinated compounds is a costly, time-consuming method known as pump and treat. "It takes forever, and treating can be costly. Sometimes the compounds are released to the atmosphere, which is undesirable," Tiedje noted. As reported in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Science, when Tiedje and colleagues went hunting for a bacterium that could break down TCA, they found the rod-shaped microbe in contaminated sediments from New York's Hudson River. "We knew this was the remaining problem in cleaning up chlorinated solvents in groundwater," Tiedje said. "We had no idea we would find something, but we had been successful in finding other organisms for other chlorinated compounds." The search for organisms that can degrade pollutants is proceeding at a "feverish pace," Gossett wrote in a commentary in Science on Tiedje's work. Finding a natural way to clean up chlorinated compounds, which are entirely man-made, presents environmental scientists with an opportunity to revise their thinking about how such pollutants might be eliminated. "There was a sort of axiom that if anything that was man-made was in the environment, it might be difficult to find organisms in (nature) that could degrade it," Gossett told UPI. "Now, slowly but surely, we've been able to find organisms that can degrade (it), " he said. Such bacteria pose a puzzle, though, because they can consume chlorinated compounds, which have been around only since the 1950s. So the question for scientists is: What were these bacteria living on before then? "No one knows. The two possibilities are that they can live on something else, or they can live on naturally produced chlorinated compounds," Tiedje said. Scientists have found such natural concentrations, noted Gossett. In any case, Tiedje said TCA1 could be injected into contaminated groundwater and "clean-up time would be fairly rapid," although the time depends on the degree and extent of contamination. (Reported by Harvey Black, UPI Science News, in Madison, Wis.) Copyright 2002 by United Press International. -0- SUBJECT CODE: 06005000 06009000 13004000 13006000 13009000 13013000 * end of story *