QUT is celebrating the appointment of four new ARC Future Fellows with grants totalling $4 million for projects that promote sustainability.
Image from left: Professor Phillip Pope, Professor Yang Liu, Dr Johanna Kenyon, Dr Luis Coelho.
Professor Yang Liu, School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, has received $1,111,200 for the project, Energy Neutral Anthropogenic Nitrogen Management.
This project aims to develop an innovative energy-neutral biological ammonium management strategy based on a novel anaerobic ammonia oxidation pathway.
The proposed program will provide the scientific foundation for restorative infrastructure and net-zero biological treatment options, and help address treatment needs for agricultural wastewater, food processing wastewater and animal manures.
“Currently, all biological wastewater treatment approaches require substantial aeration energy inputs, to provide enough oxygen as the electron acceptor to biochemically oxidize ammonium to nitrate,” Professor Liu said.
“I will develop a system based on the ammonia-oxidising microorganisms that live in the dark, deep-sea environment where oxygen is not available.”
The completed project will benefit a wide range of industries looking for affordable and net-zero ways to manage ammonium wastes, an important step toward global net-zero carbon emissions.
Professor Liu will supervise two PhD researchers and four Honours students and will collaborate with researchers in Canada.
Dr Johanna Kenyon, from QUT School of Biomedical Sciences has received $985,687 for a project titled Unlocking the potential of bacterial polymers by defining key determinants.
This research aims to generate foundational knowledge on the protective coating, known as capsule, that surrounds cells of Acinetobacter bacteria.
Dr Kenyon said the structures that made up these protective coatings represented naturally occurring ‘green’ biopolymers, and this project would improve understandings on their potential use in the bioremediation of environments contaminated with toxic hydrocarbons.
“The research will involve a unique discovery-based approach to characterise capsule polymerase enzymes that modify these structures in response to bacterial viruses in their environment, and how these changes influence capsule properties,” Dr Kenyon said.
Research outcomes will include the development of an innovative genomics pipeline to detect capsule change in collaboration with both Australian and prominent international research leaders, uniting four scientific disciplines: bacterial polysaccharides, carbohydrate chemistry, genomics, and bacteriophage.
This project will further support one postdoctoral researcher, two PhD researchers and one Honours student.
Dr Luis Pedro Coelho from QUT School of Biomedical Sciences and the QUT Centre for Microbiome Research has received $979,500 for the project, Understanding prokaryotic small proteins from context.
This project aims to develop new methods to identify and predict the functions of small proteins from microbial communities by studying sequence patterns in their genomes.
Professor Coelho said prokaryotic small proteins are increasingly recognised to play important biological roles with potential for widespread applications in medicine, agriculture, and the food industry.
“As they have been largely overlooked due to lack of adequate computational tools to study them this project will develop methods that exploit evolutionary and genomic context of small proteins to understand their role,” Professor Coelho said.
“Our aim is to build and analyse a catalogue of high-quality small proteins in the global microbiome by exploiting public metagenomic datasets. We will then experimentally validate 50-100 small proteins for their predicted functions.”
By creating new ways to study small proteins in the global microbiome, this project will provide the foundational knowledge required to leverage these proteins for use in biotechnology.
Professor Coelho will supervise two PhD research students during the project.
Professor Phillip Pope’s project HoliCOW - A holobiont strategy to uncover the core microbiome in cows, has received $1,111,272.
The project aims to unravel the biological connections across the cow holobiont (the species living in, on and around a host) pertaining to the feed cows eat, their bodily function and the microbes in their rumen (first part of a cow’s stomach).
Professor Pope, from QUT School of Biomedical Sciences and the QUT Centre for Microbiome Research said manipulating or controlling ruminant microbiomes was a key strategy in reducing methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas responsible for around 30 per cent of the rise in global temperatures.
“Methane emissions from agriculture account for 40-45 per cent of the global methane pool, 50 per cent of which comes from ruminant animals such as cattle but while many methane mitigation technologies are emerging, many knowledge gaps restrict us from seeing predictable benefits when we use them,” Professor Pope said.
“This is largely due to a lack of precision knowledge of the rumen microbiome, which is the source of methane generation in ruminants and the target of mitigation technologies.
“This project will produce the needed knowledge of not only core microbiome populations and their metabolic function but also their intimate connection to host metabolism and variables that influence microbiome composition and structure, such as host genotype and diet.”
The research outcomes will affect Australian and UN priority areas to address challenges related to climate as well as sustainable, efficient and ethical food production.
The project will involve two PhD researchers and three Honours students and collaboration with Professor Gene Tyson, Dr Simon McIlroy (Centre for Microbiome Research, QUT) and Professor Rainer Roehe (Scotland Rural University College).
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