Position: Master’s student
Department: Chemical and Biological Engineering
Meerab Joseph
Research Title: Elucidate the morphological and biomechanical characteristic of Ob3b at different concentrations of methane.
The BuG ReMeDEE initiative is a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored program which is designed to study extremophiles that consume methane. It is named Building Genome-to-Phenome Infrastructure for Regulating Methane in Deep and Extreme Environments (BuG ReMeDEE). This research (pronounced “bug remedy”) will help better understand the methane cycle in the hot water fissures under Yellowstone National Park and deep inside Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). The methane cycle is the generation and consumption of methane by various microbes. Methlosinus Tichosporium Ob3b is a methanotroph found in these extreme environments and plays a huge role in methane regulation. For this project, to elucidate the morphological and biomechanical characteristics of Ob3b, it will be grown in optimized media at varying methane concentrations, it will be then be observed using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and BET analysis for surface area. These techniques would help determine the morphological changes occurring in Ob3b at different methane concentrations while determining its biomechanical characteristics.