The safe disposal and eventual utilization of human sewage has been a core issue for development since the dawn of humanity. Still, 3.5 billion humans in the world don't have access to adequate sanitation systems.
Moreover, "adequate" systems mostly rely on killing entire ecosystems, such as rivers and coasts, with enormous discharges of blackwater until biotic and abiotic factors can finally reduce the concentration of pollutants.
Constructed Wetlands are a Nature-Based Solution in which a freshwater community in a relatively closed system cleans the water before it reaches the soil and the river. At the base of this technology are microorganisms that can rapidly outcompete coliforms, allowing sufficient oxygen to fuel the metabolic removal of contaminants by other microorganisms, fungi, plants, and animals.
It is a solution that not only reduces water contamination and disease spread, but also produces a biodiverse wetland.
The key to the correct function of such a system, therefore, is an efficient community of bacteria. Camila Knecht visited the Institut Pasteur in Montevideo to apply the latest genomics technology to identify potential team members present in successfully constructed wetlands by linking them to specific functions in the process.
The aim is to design microbial consortia for efficient constructed wetlands that can provide affordable, locally managed sanitation solutions for Rural Latin America and the World. We thank Drs. Tamara Fernández (Institut Pasteur Montevideo) and Daniela Centron (IMPaM, Universidad de Buenos Aires) for guiding this research, which would have been impossible with only traditional bacterial cultivation and characterization methods.
