In 1989 a fire broke out in oil shale mine in Kohtla Järve, Estonia and it took 48 days to extinguish. The burning oil shale released toxic phenolic compounds, threatening groundwater and consequently groundwater water bodies, including one of the major lakes, Lake Peipus, the 5th largest lake in Europe. For preventing a potential nature catastrophe, as Pseudomonas was already known to degrade phenolic compounds, an engineered Pseudomonas putida was released in the affected area as a measure of bioremediation. This event represents one of the first recorded deliberate release of a recombinant microbe into an ecosystem. Six years later, in 1995, the same gene sequence was found in native Pseudomonas, suggesting possible horizontal gene transfer.
To search for these genes, the scientist from MIT Voigt Lab traveled to Kohtla-Järve, Estonia to collect samples from the release site. This was already their second visit following the first one in Septemper 2023 when they extracted DNA from 68 soil and water samples collected around the release site. Alina Rekena, PhD student in Bioengineering is part of the project and helping with sample taking as well as analysis. The aim is to perform a metagenomic analysis to gain key insights into the implications of introducing engineered organisms into natural ecosystems.
Read more about this topic: Acquisition of a deliberately introduced phenol degradation operon, pheBA, by different indigenous Pseudomonas species | Applied and Environmental Microbiology
and Design and regulation of engineered bacteria for environmental release | Nature Microbiology