Week 3 – Bioremediation – Key


2. Place the examples of biotechnology into the right
column.                                                          Do you know any other examples?



Food

                    Medicines

                               Eco-friendly products

                                                     Genetics

                                                                                Biological Weapons

making cheese/yogurt


making wine/beer

                    antibiotics


                    vaccines

                               biodegradable plastics


                               biofuels

                                                     genetically modified plants


                                                     cloning

                                                                                anthrax

                                                                                ricin

3.

1)

   c)

2)

   b)

3)

   a)

4)

   a)

5)

   c)

6)

   c)

7)

   a)

8)

   c)

9)

   d)

10)

   d)

4. b)

5.

They´re very good organisms. These organisms help clean up a lot of the contaminated areas, or
contaminated sites that we would have around in our environment and they do so by just carrying out
their daily activities. So they´re breathing and eating various chemicals that are in the
environment and they survive that way and at the same time they help us by removing things that we
don´t want to have there.

We have recently isolated an organism that we refer to as BAV 1, and that stands for Bachman
vinylchloride 1. Bachman is the road site where we found it and it degrades this chemical
vinylchloride that contains one chlorine on it and it´s a carcinogen and a chemical we don´t want
accumulating in our groundwater supplies at all. And BAV 1 is a member of  a group of organisms
called Dehalococcoides, and that´s basically, „dehalo-„ means removing a halogen, like chlorine,
and „coccoide“ means round shaped. This is Dehalococcoides isolate BAV1. It´s very small, it´s
smaller than one micron in diameter, and it lives in our groundwaters – in almost any groundwater
area. It does not grow using oxygen - in fact, if we put it out in our room, it would die. It has
to breathe these chlorinated chemicals.


6.

1) discover

              a)  a strain of bacteria

2) clean up

              b) a pollutant

3) publish

              c) a scientific paper

4) leech

              d) into groundwater

5) contaminate

              e) supplies of drinking water

6) release

              f) into the atmosphere

7) conduct

              g) physiological studies