1-I am delighted to share with you this paper, a collaboration between my lab (postdoc @JooYoungLee15) and the Fernandez lab in the department of Horticulture @MSU. You can download it for free until January 15, 2020: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1a7qb9pi-M6C3 

A little bit of background... THREAD

2-This work was led by a terrific graduate student, Damon Abdi, and his advisor Tom Fernandez. Damon is developing treatment systems for the remediation of nitrates and phosphates in agricultural run-offs. You can learn more about Damon's work here: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/damon-abdis-research-improves-nursery-production

3-For this paper, Damon constructed laboratory-scale wood chip bioreactors equipped with secondary adsorbent aggregate filters and optimized treatment variables for the remediation of nitrate and phosphate in the presence of commonly used pesticides.

4-With controlled operation, the wood chip bioreactors removed 99% of the nitrate while the filters retained 80-87% of the phosphates, even in the presence of the insecticide chlorpyrifos.

5-Damon knew that nitrate removal was the result of microbial activities and wanted to learn more. Problem was that he had no training in microbiology nor did he knew any microbiologist. So he checked the faculty directory at @MSU_MMG and sent me an e-mail.

6-I did not reply (at least timely) because... well... academia, you know.

7-After several days of silence, he stopped by my office unannounced. He told me about his research, which I found very exciting and in line with new projects in my lab to study nitrate remediation.

8-Damon wanted to learn more about microbiology and invited me to join his PhD guidance committee. He also wanted to sample the wood chips and learn more about the microbes that were responsible for the remediation of nitrate.

9-So he teamed up with my wonderful postdoc @JooYoungLee15, who mentored him to learn the basics (literally, Damon had never seen a pipette!). Together, they recovered in pure culture the dominant denitrifies (45 isolates in all) in the wood chip bioreactors.

10-We followed a cultivation approach so Damon could learn microbiology techniques. We also knew from previous work that the active denitrifying population in wood chip bioreactors is cultivable. Plus, we wanted to recover isolates with remediation potential for future studies.

11-We identified bacterial isolates from control and pesticide-treated bioreactors and used them as proxies of agrochemical and pesticide removal. The most notable was the replacement of Bacillus with Exiguobacterium and Pseudomonas species with pesticides.

12-Damon has scaled up this treatment platform in the field for the in situ removal of agrochemicals and pesticides from agricultural runoff. He is literally crunching the numbers as we speak and preparing a new publication. He will be defending his dissertation this winter.

13-And I leave you with a picture of Damon, replacing the micropipette and lab coat with his favorite field tool.
From:
https://www.canr.msu.edu/contentAsset/image/84a11752-ebef-4a6d-b8e8-bb35bdce9d59/fileAsset/filter/Resize,Jpeg/resize_w/720/jpeg_q/80