About This Project

One month after the train disaster in East Palestine, OH, we visited the site on March 2, 2023 to take environmental samples. The goal of this project is to sequence these samples and create a publicly accessible resource for biologists who want to study the impacts of an acute dose of toxic chemicals which include plastic precursors.

We will ask, which species survive and what tools of bio-resilience might we discover? What adaptations and proteins might we see from the data?

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

There is significant research done on the main three unwanted chemicals in the atmosphere: CO2, CH4 and N2O. However, there are significantly less orchestrated, experimental efforts seeking to understand the biological harms and responses to the "long tail" of anthropogenic molecules. Pollution is under-appreciated relative to impact in translational biotech (see thesis in blog) and there is an opportunity to increase engagement on pollution in the bioengineering community.

The spirit of this project is a mix of climate biotech, environmental justice, machine learning and citizen science.

What is the significance of this project?

Taking biological samples in the middle of a toxic site where tankers full of vinyl chloride were exploded can help to determine the potential health risks to people and the environment. The awful event in East Palestine, OH, is an opportunity to understand the microbial ecology and perhaps even protein toolkits, for responding to the plastic precursor molecules (train manifest) that were combusted in early February 2022.

Microbes capable of metabolizing polyvinyl chloride (PVC) have been isolated recently (Zhang 2022) and there was a 2018 NSF grant studying PVC degradation in contaminated systems. This is a unique opportunity to study a snapshot of the microbial activity within weeks of the ground zero event relative to the baseline a nearby, upstream spring.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal is to create an accessible resource to engage more bioengineers into bio-resilience and remediation. We have collected samples for both biological (omics) and chemical analysis (water geohydrochemistry) by a person well-experienced with difficult sample acquisition.

The goal is also to answer big questions: can we identify novel microorganisms that degrade toxic chemicals, can we monitor the change in the microbial community, can we assess additional health risks to the human population, and can we gain insight into new bioremediation approaches (both for the environmental and human health).

In this case, we know we have the samples, we know there are organizations that can reliably do the sequencing, we just need to raise matching funds to support.