At an old steel site in Pittsburgh, bacteria evolved to survive – and eat – industrial pollution

A Carnegie Mellon microbiologist is studying soil at Hazelwood Green, a 178-acre former steel site on Pittsburgh's riverfront contaminated with benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, to identify bacteria that evolved to tolerate or consume those pollutants. The lab extracts DNA from soil cores and uses metagenomic sequencing to map which microbes are present and what genes they carry.

Researchers then test candidate bacteria directly, growing them with individual pollutants as the sole food source to see if they can degrade contaminants, using a robotic automated lab at CMU's AI Science Foundry to screen thousands of species at once.

The goal is to speed up discovery of bacteria and genes useful for cleaning up other contaminated brownfield sites, since remediation remains, in the researcher's words, difficult and expensive.

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