Separately from our work with Bac-Tech, Flowing River Solutions is also collaborating with Dr Hoi-Ying N Holman, who is a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Director of the Berkeley Synchrotron Infrared Structural Bioimaging (BSISB) imaging program at the Advanced Light Source.

Her primary research emphasis is in microbial ecology and geomicrobiology, especially as they relate to bioremediation of pollutants, biofuel and bioavailability of chemicals to ecological receptors.

She was awarded the 2010 David A. Shirley Award for her pioneering work in using synchrotron infrared to characterize chemical reactions and function in living microorganisms in vivo.

Her novel approach (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac100991d) enables alternate ways to study the enormous yet untapped natural microbial world and to design new ways to effectively manipulate them for societal and environmental benefits.

Through the BSISB program (https://bsisb.lbl.gov/), she focuses on developing and providing new photon technologies for understanding the fundamental concepts of systems biology and environmental stress response pathways from the molecular to the ecosystem level to improve our knowledge of biogeochemistry, bioenergy, and bioremediation for a sustainable environment and land use.

Playing the title role in the movie Erin Brockovitch, Julia Roberts learned that bad things happen when hexavelent chromium gets into ground water.

This carcinogenic, mutagenic, highly toxic metal forms soluble chromates that can readily cross cell membranes.

Trivalent chromium, on the other hand – its atoms stripped of three electrons instead of six – is much less toxic, because it forms mostly insoluble compounds that can’t enter cells.

Dr Hoi-Ying Holman’s research has shown how hexavalent chromium reduces to trivalent chromium naturally in some geological formations.

“At first, infrared spectromicroscopy showed no evidence of reduction, and it appeared that many of the organisms were dying. But after four months, chromium-tolerant and chromium-reducing microorganisms were seen to be thriving in association with trivalent chromium.

“As far as we know, this is the first time that infrared synchrotron studies have been used to follow the steps in the transformation of toxic chromium on mineral surfaces,”

Dr. Holman says. Moreover:

“We have shown that organic vapor may accelerate the transformation. This should help in the design and implementation of new, environmentally benign remediation techniques for cleaning up mixed waste sites.”