NYWEA hosts three presenters to talk about fermentation, DNA analysis and disinfection.
BROOKE DELLA ROCCO / THE QUADRANGLE
Brooke Della Rocco, Senior Writer
On Thursday, March 11, the New York Water Environment Association (NYWEA) Metropolitan Chapter attended Manhattan University (MU) for University Night, held down in Leo Hall. At this event, three studies were presented by different students that further investigated different aspects of fermentation, DNA analysis and disinfection.
NYWEA is a nonprofit educational foundation and was founded in 1929, with a purpose to, “serve the best interest of the public by promoting sustainable clean water quality management through science, education and training,” according to nywea.org.
The first presentation was titled, “From Detection to Disinfection: Using Fluorescence Spectroscopy to Track Herbicides in Drinking Water,” by Andrew F. Kurian and speaker and undergraduate student Mahnoor Sultan. Sultan started this project when she discovered hydrilla, an invasive underwater plant found just upstream of Croton Reservoir. A systematic herbicide commonly used to control hydrilla is fluridone, often applied directly to water bodies, and can potentially enter drinking-water reservoirs at trace concentrations. Sultan constructed the challenge of developing a rapid, reliable monitoring method to evaluate the effectiveness of Fluridone removal techniques.
“New York has a maximum contaminant level of 50 micrograms per liter, while UPA recommends a health advisory level of 150 micrograms per liter,” Sultan said. “There remains a significant gap in understanding how fluoridone moves through our water supply system and how efficiently conventional water treatment processes such as ultraviolet disinfection and chlorination remove fluoridone from drinking water, without reliable and efficient methods to monitor and quantify herbicide removal in real time.”
Sultan proposed fluorescence spectroscopy as her method and promising alternatives for rapid herbicide detection. This technique involved exciting sample molecules with specific wavelengths of light and measuring the emitted fluorescence, producing a three dimensional excitation emission matrix.
From her studies, Sultan gathered that neither UV nor chlorine alone remove fluridone completely, as removal is concentration dependent. She predicts that utilities may need combined or advanced processes for full removal. As for future plans, she hopes to expand upon her studies and learn more about the processes and real-life implications.
“We do want to look at how other herbicides are removed,” Sultan said. “So, we are eager to look at where that takes us.”
The second presentation was titled, “Photodegradation of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Water: Impact of DNA Conformation on Measured Photodegradation Rate,” by Alma Rocha, a Ph.D candidate from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Rocha’s research was centered around antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), or DNA segments that encode for resistance to antibiotics, as well as antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB), or bacteria that have acquired ARGs allowing them to be resistant to antibiotics. Their presence serves as a public health threat as over 2.8 million ARB infections occur in the U.S. each year, as well as the fact that there is high risk of ARGs in aquatic environments. She received assistance from the Silverman Lab, as well as funding from the National Science Foundation and NYU.
Through her research, Rocha found that sunlight was a successful decay process, and that the understanding of photodegradation of ARGs benefit expanding knowledge of fate and transfer of any environmental DNA.
“Now we know that sunlight is a powerful decay process that mitigates this problem,” Rocha said. “A really cool thing about working with DNA is that all DNA is made up of the same four nucleotides, so this knowledge of regeneration of energies can also benefit other types of work.”
The final presentation was named, “Implications of Organic Waste Fermentation in New York City,” as presented by David Cham, from The City College of New York. He focused on two waste streams: cake from wastewater treatment plants and food waste. Through his research, Cham focused on the impact of pH control on fermentation, and ultimately found that controlled fermentation significantly increased volatile fatty acid (VFA) production.
“We’re already controlling the pH in our fermented food waste,” Cham said. “So we could probably take our orbit further and aim towards some kind of ammonia stripping, or even some thermal alkaline pre-treatments to hydrolyze more organics.”
Cham mentioned how he hopes to look into other treatments in the future and expand upon his initial research and labs.
“There’s a lot of technologies out there that are novel, such as membrane treatments and electrodialysis,” Cham said. “Things that we can play around with to aim to not only remove nitrogen, but maybe even recover ammonia as a concentrated pure solution.and not have this complex matrix of fermenting.”