Many faculty of the Center have received funding recently from corporations and government agencies:
Peter Adriaens, Sheridan Haack, Frank Chapelle and Larry Forney received an $85,000 grant, as sub-grantee under the National Center for Integrative Bioremediation Research and Development, to assist in an EPA-funded bioremediation study of contaminated soils at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base near Oscoda, Michigan.
Frans de Bruijn and Frank Louws, in partnership with E.R. Fowlks of Hampton University, received a $268,000, two-year grant from the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, Heinz USA, Rogers Seed Co., Procter & Gamble, and the State of Michigan. The grant is for Automated Fluorescent Genomic Fingerprinting of Bacteria.
Dave Emerson, in conjunction with Koh Development, Inc., received a $265,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop and evaluate further a diffusion gradient chamber for culturing microorganisms.
Larry Forney, Associate Director of the Center, received a $99,000 grant from Procter & Gamble to study the Japanese government tests for biodegradability of new chemicals.
John Frost, of the Chemistry department, and Larry Forney received a $240,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for research on the manufacture of vanillin, PABA and other chemicals by environmentally more benign methods.
Jim Tiedje, Tamara Tsoi and Jim Champine received a Department of Defense grant of $150,000 per year in a two-part program to study the recombinant bacteria that will grow on PCBs and to analyze microbial communities that dechlorinate PCE to ethene.
Niels Larsen joined CME as a visiting assistant professor. Niels received his Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Denmark, where he developed and used computer programs to study the structure of RNAs. He then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was instrumental in the design and operation of the Ribosomal Database Project (RDP) . At the Center he will concentrate on ecological applications that can be generated from the analysis of ribosomal RNA data. He also will be pivotal in the project to link other microbiology databases with the RDP.
Seventeen people from the Center attended the 7th triennial International Symposium on Microbial Ecology (ISME-7), in Santos, Brazil, in August. The conference attracted 850 scientists from 61 countries.
Svetlana Dedysh, from the Institute of Microbiology, Russian Academy of Science, was at the Center for three months on the Russian cooperative program. She worked with Jim Tiedje and Jizhong Zhou on characterizing the methanotrophs from the acid tiagas wetlands of northern Russia.
The Digital Learning Center for Microbial Ecology (DLC-ME) won third prize for its poster at the ISME-7 conference in Brazil. The poster included images taken from the "Microbe Zoo" and a computer demonstration of the Zoo. DLC-ME is being developed by the Communications Technology Lab at MSU in collaboration with CME scientists and the College of Education. This project is funded in part by the NSF.
Rich Lenski and Larry Forney presented at the Jacques Monod Conference on Evolutionary Genetics and Adaptation, in Aussois, France, September 25-29.
Maria Sizova, from the Institute of Microbiology, Russian Academy of Science, worked at the Center for five months on the Russian cooperative program. She worked with Eldor Paul and Dave Harris on microbial growth kinetics in cold oligotrophic wetlands of northern Russia.
Jim Tiedje was one of the keynote speakers at the Pasteur Symposium: A Centennial Tribute to Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), held in Beijing, China and sponsored by UNESCO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Yoshikuni Urushigawa, Chief Senior Researcher, and Yuichi Suwa, Senior Researcher, both of Japan's National Institute for Resources and Environment, conducted research at the CME lab for three and six weeks, respectively, in November and December.
Kazunari Yokoyama, from Tsukuba, Japan, received an OECD Fellowship to work with Jim Tiedje for ten weeks on soil community diversity analysis.
Fred Michel, C.A. Reddy and Larry Forney spoke at the annual conference of the Michigan Recycling Coalition, October 21-23, in Novi. They spoke on the fate of xenobiotics during yard trimmings composting, and the microbiology of composting.
Frank Louws, a postdoc with Frans de Bruijn, has become an Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University.
Jim Champine, formerly a postdoc with Jim Tiedje, has become an Assistant Professor at Southeast Missouri State University.