Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE150100009
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$389,476.00
Summary
Toxic Oceans: How do anthropogenic pollutants impact vital marine microbes? Environmental pollution threatens the sustainability of the world's oceans. However, we still do not understand how pollution affects primary producers at the base of oceanic food chains. This project aims to provide the first account of how common chemical pollutants (herbicides, plastic leachates and crude oil) affect key groups of marine photosynthetic bacteria. As these microbes underpin entire marine food webs, unde ....Toxic Oceans: How do anthropogenic pollutants impact vital marine microbes? Environmental pollution threatens the sustainability of the world's oceans. However, we still do not understand how pollution affects primary producers at the base of oceanic food chains. This project aims to provide the first account of how common chemical pollutants (herbicides, plastic leachates and crude oil) affect key groups of marine photosynthetic bacteria. As these microbes underpin entire marine food webs, understanding their responses is crucial to monitoring and mitigating the impact of pollutants on ocean ecosystems. The aim is to design and validate novel, rapid environmental stress assays, based on gene expression profiling. This represents a pioneering new application of gene monitoring techniques to ocean conservation.Read moreRead less
E. coli as an indicator of faecal contamination in the Australian context. The goal of this research is to improve our ability to use Escherichia coli as an indicator of water quality by determining the extent to which non-faecal sources of E. coli contribute to coliform counts and to develop a method to differentiate non-faecal E. coli from those that are faecal derived.