Bailey Metcalf
Biology
Scientific Paper Review
December 12, 2014 The article Microbiology of biomining: development and optimization of mineral-oxidizing microbial consortia is about biomining and how that affects biodiversity. Biomining is a new area of biotechnology that is proving to be very successful in these operations. In the article, it talks about “theoretical and pragmatic aspects” of building microbial consortia to recover different types of minerals. It also discusses the problems with using consortia in a non-sterile environment at the industrial-scale of these mines. In the field of biomining, not much has been done. It is developing into a successful area of biotechnology but is not as large of microbial process as drug production. The monitoring of the cultures used has been watched very seldom if at all. This leads to questions about how efficient the populations of microbial are at processing the different minerals. One challenge that needs to be addressed is “how populations of mineral-oxidizers could be modified and controlled, particularly within heap leaching operations”. Also, there needs to be research done to see how the microbial consortium for biooxidation will develop when put under different conditions like temperature or pH levels. There are a few questions being posed in this article. One of them is “How would microbial cultures developed for continuous-flow stirred-tank reactors different in the case of heap reactors”? Another is “Is there an advantage in importing an active consortium from elsewhere compared with selecting a consortium from indigenous micro-organisms found in the locality of a deposit”? The question about there being only one vs. many ideal combinations of micro-organisms is also being asked in this paper. The approach that was taken to answer these questions was collecting data that other scientists had found and compiled it into a larger group of data to answer the questions being asked. Charts and tables were used to display this data in an organized fashion. The results from the data showed that the types of micro-organisms found in stirred-tank and heap reactors are mostly similar. The difference between the two was in the tank, adaptation to rapid growth might take years rather than weeks. In the heap, most micro-organisms attached themselves to minerals so they did not need to adapt to have efficient growth. From the data, they found that for certain situations, unadapt micro-organisms would work better than the ones that had been pre-adapted since a characteristic was required that was not previously possessed. By putting an unadapt organism in that environment, it would be able to adapt and build a resistance to whatever the toxin may be. The data also showed that there is a high probability “that more than one combination of micro-organisms, once fully adapted, is likely to be equally efficient at biooxidizing a particular mineral. The results from the data answered some of the questions asked. It showed that there is a good chance of having multiple combinations of micro-organisms that will