Biology

OIL-EATING MICROBES FOR GULF SPILL
A Florida start-up thinks it can save the Gulf; experts doubt it.
Two weeks ago, Ben Lyons, a research scientist and engineer at the small biotech firmEvolugate, hopped in his car and drove from his lab in Gainesville, Fla., to New Orleans. There he talked his way onto a 9-meter catamaran that was heading out on a research trip into the Gulf of Mexico toinvestigate the massive oil spill from a gushing BP well.
About 30 kilometers south of the Mississippi River Delta, Lyons scooped up a dozen liters of water and oil. That mixture now fills hiscompany’s bioreactor, a 4-meter-long translucent tube with a laser that shoots beams through the liquid. Inside, populations of 18 types of oil-eating microorganisms are feasting on BP’s oil.
Lyons and hiscolleagues hope that during the next 6 months, their bioreactor will help to rapidly evolve a population of superefficient oil-eating bacteria ideally suited to the conditions of the Gulf of Mexico.Later this year, the company plans to spray the bacteria over the Gulf’s oil-covered waters. But Evolugate is facing long odds. In peer-reviewed scientific studies, seeding oil spills with microbes hasnever helped the cleanup process, and microbiologists who worked on the Exxon Valdez spill off the coast of Alaska doubt that the outcome will be different this time.
”There was an awful lot of hypein the 1970s and 1980s about adding bacteria, and it didn’t really pan out,” says Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University who worked on the Exxon Valdezcleanup effort.
The Exxon Valdez spill was the site of the world’s largest experiment in a technique called bioremediation, which aimed to add bacteria and nutrients to the oil-filled water, saysRonald Atlas, a biology professor at the University of Louisville, but the efforts failed. ”The bacteria are already out there,” says Kenneth Lee, a researcher who founded the Centre for Offshore...